watercolour, ©2025 Charlene Brown
My computer had been offering me various AI
programs every day for months, but I hadn’t really followed up on any of
them ̶ until DeepSeek hit North
America and I signed up along with millions of others.
After DeepSeek asked how it could “help me
today,” I made the rookie mistake of requesting:
“Add content, improve
composition, colour combinations and value contrasts in a watercolour painting”
I was planning to feed it the Hellebore
painting above, and see what it could do with it. However, my request caused it to reply:
“Okay, the user
wants to improve their watercolor painting in terms of composition, color
combinations, and value contrasts. Let me start by breaking down each of these
elements”… followed by 1077 well-organized, straightforward words instructing
me how to do it myself.
It crossed my mind that this particular
Artificial Intelligence program was a little more intelligent than I was, but I
quickly reassured myself that it was simply more devious. I also recalled that one of my Plans for myBlog for 2025 was “AI Training: learning
more about the AI capabilities on my computer, as well as training that AI to
understand my way of thinking in order to refine my ideas and, possibly, my
paintings.”
But
when I began to ‘train’ my AI, I remembered I had been reading about DeepSeek’s
latest model ̶ Janus Pro, which features “Vision AND Image Gen
In ONE Model” ̶ and realized that was not what
I had. My version of DeepSeek is apparently
untrainable in the image-fixing field.
As I was only going to be able to refine
my text, I gave it some notes on ‘the time of year hellebores bloom’ and
received this reply:
“Hellebores, known as Lenten roses or Christmas roses, are
perennial plants prized for their early blooming period and ability to thrive
in cooler climates. In temperate
climates, their blooming season is usually February to April, but can begin as
early as late December in milder areas.
They are among the first plants to bloom, often emerging through snow or
frost.”
To this I added:
“In the (sometimes) Mediterranean climate here on the southern tip of
Vancouver Island, hellebores have been blooming since Christmas. And they seem to be coping with the
surprising dump of snow we’re getting right now better than most of us.”
I would have to use other AI programs to
fix my pictures. It came down to a
choice between Adobe Photoshop’s Generative AI capabilities and Adobe
Firefly. I’ve been using Photoshop for almost
thirty years, having taken my first lesson in Dubai in 1996, but this was my
first try at using its Generative AI function.
Here is what I got when I selected the foreground and asked it to “improve value contrasts and add budding mauve crocus bulbs”:
And here’s what I got when I selected the whole picture and asked it to “add 10 cm of snow on the ground, trees and flowers.”
Second try with AI
So I’m conceding that Photoshop Generative AI
won the first two rounds. But I will try
to ‘train’ it again, after I’ve done some more reading.
I’ll keep you posted…
