What kind of sorcery is this? House of Retouching meets AI.

In the beginning there was beautiful chaos. The power to generate beautiful images in a second by a simple command. This new technology quickly conquered the world, inspiring wonder, fascination, and uncertainty. Was this a genius solution? Or a dangerous threat to the post-production market, photographers, and other creatives?

At House of Retouching, we’re quick to explore new technologies that can improve our work, an attitude we’ve embraced from the beginning. So we decided to take a look at this new “magic”. It was unexpectedly easy to generate nice images, but our exploration brought a few questions into focus:

What are its limits? Can we overcome them?
Can we use AI to our advantage?
Does AI fit into our unique style and workflow?
What is wrong with the hands? (More on this topic later…)

Ahead, join us on a journey of AI exploration, from the challenges we faced to the steps we used to overcome them.

We came up with a campaign opportunity for a virtual client that allowed us to test Ai’s function in product placement, synthesizing our known retouching techniques with images generated by Ai. With some practice to overcome AI’s random generation patterns, we discovered that requesting product images from a CGI model can produce a spectacular campaign!

After an extensive and energetic brainstorming session, we decided to push the technology to the limit of its capabilities. Appealing to our inner nerds, we unanimously merged our passion for fantasy, SciFi, and a touch of patriot duty, into the only obvious choice for a full-scale virtual campaign: “The Witcher”.

Our goal was to discover a way for our hero, The Witcher, to advertise these products in his world using AI. Maybe an image where The Witcher brags about a killed monster on social media? Sounds awesome, right? Well, here is the result of our request:

AI Community standards are some of the most restricted that we’ve come across. For example, it restricts popular phrases having to do with things like death, nakedness, or violence (a challenge when the subject is a show like The Witcher). Looking for a correct phrase that won’t affect the community standards is difficult. During trial and error, we faced issues with perspective and even came up with a few recruits for The Witcher’s cast.

Finally, we discovered a solution. We resorted to generating images that show positive relationships between “The Witcher” and the beasts…

We were still left with the question of how to “kill” the beast in AI without breaking the community rules. After a long struggle for the best solution, we found discovered that the phrase “dream” was the cure. This time, you don’t see a killed beast, but rather a beast that is sleeping soundly in a dream state.

Not to mention the next problem… the resolution of the image generated by AI. Resolution 1,2Mpx/70dpi is not enough for our House of Retouching standards, generating high-end images while retaining their quality.

We were very happy with the results. The difference in details and sharpness between the original image (left) and the upscaled image (right) is breathtaking. We now had a good-quality image on which to begin our tried-and-true retouching techniques.

A few things to note:

• The hand holding the cell phone lacked focus and sharpness. So, using AI, we rectified the image to highlight the phone, which is the focal point of the image.
• The cell phone placed in The Witcher’s hand is a CGI image model product provided by the client.
• We managed to remove all issues after image generation with AI.
• At the end, we added a few final “magic touches” with Colour Grading.

What about the rest of the client’s product ecosystem, you may ask? Using our method, we can create a world of new product scenarios without a problem. The Witcher’s best friend, Jaskier, is recording the whole fight on a tablet.

Are you curious about how exhausting it was to defeat the beast? Thanks to this smartwatch application, we now know!

Remember back at the beginning when we mentioned a problem with hands? The smartwatch case revealed AI’s difficulty with depicting human hands. Without a phrase to guide it toward the 5-fingered configuration, what is obvious for us might not be obvious for AI.

Here the beast probably won. The Witcher had household duties like everyone else, chores must be done before Yennefer returns, otherwise...

Finally, we created graphic designs for the advertising materials — posters and billboards — using the AI-generated images and 3D product models. Here’s the final result of our virtual campaign:

Our exploration of AI revealed an opportunity for brands and clients to imagine scenarios that were previously unattainable. With a bit of patience and problem-solving, combined with our retouching experience, we...

• Tamed the chaos of AI prompts and community standards.
• Joined the smart technology world with the world of magic and ancient power.
• Solved the problem of small dimension images generated by AI.
• Avoided a machine’s misunderstanding of human hands using prompts.
• Merged AI-generated images with CGI product models provided by the client.
• Kept the unique House of Retouching style for which we’re known.
• Used new technology to deliver an innovative campaign for our virtual client.

With the rapid development of AI technology, changes happen every day. While we overcame many challenges in our exploration; we know new ones will arise as we continue to adopt new methods and technology in our work.

We are so excited to be a part of this journey which still is moving forward into the future of technology and retouching. Who knows where it’ll lead us...