AI is getting scary good at editing! - Here’s how you can literally change the time of day in a photo…
Afternoon light mixed with overcast skies can make even the prettiest scenes look dull and gray. I wondered how the same scene would look if it were taken during golden hour.
Here’s exactly what I wrote to ChatGPT to edit the photo:
“Add some realistic haze and sun rays to this photo. The light should be coming from the top right corner of the frame, and simulate golden hour lighting. The haze should be just enough to realistically simulate the light casting complex shadows on the buildings and the rest of the scene.”…and that was it!
30 seconds later, the edit was completed. It genuinely looked like the time of day had changed to golden hour!
I couldn’t believe it. To achieve comparable results in Lightroom and Photoshop would have taken ages. I had to try it again. This time I wondered how it would look if we changed the scene to night time. I wrote to ChatGPT:
“Change the time of day in this photo to dusk, just after as the sun is starting to set, and windows are starting to light up. There is still some daylight, but the sky is about to get dark. Make it as realistic as possible and keep the scene as unchanged as possible.”
Again, the result was unbelievable.
You can see for yourself below!
On a more serious note...
I think AI, whether you hate it or love it, is here to stay. The genie is already out of the bottle and we can’t put him back inside. Ethically, I would never use generative AI to this extent on paid work (unless the client specifically asked for it). The above photo was from my personal archives, taken while on vacation, and I thought it’d be the perfect candidate to try editing with AI. Just as Photoshop was once heavily criticized by purists as “fake” when it first emerged, we may be seeing a similar pushback against AI today. As a photographer, any tool that makes my life easier is worth considering and learning about. Afterall, the above photo is still largely unaltered. The important details are still preserved. The ability to alter the time of day in a photo is undeniably powerful, and there are many situations where it could be useful. At the same time, in a landscape oversaturated with misinformation and disingenuous content, I’m extremely wary of adding to that noise.
What do you think? To what extent should AI be used when it comes to editing photos, if at all? Let me know!