Illusion wrote:
... reducing figures to tools to create nice pictures rather than making nice pictures of the figures themselves… does that make any sense to anyone else?
Yes, that makes sense to me. However, what is at issue is the end result desired by the photographer or image creator. Sometimes the objective is to present a photo of a detailed figure. Other times, the result is to create a photograph, or a scene, that tells a story or creates a mood, and the figure is, as you say, simply one of the tools used to create the final image.
Most of us on
this forum, which is an action figure forum, after all, are interested in the figures themselves. I follow some digital artists on
other platforms who use figures, and who even go to considerable lengths to create costumes, settings, and miniature props for those figures, as the basis for digitally enhanced images, with the images being the objective and the figures being elements used to achieve that objective.
As the AI generative art apps continue to improve and to become more user-friendly, I expect to see a
lot more of this type of digital image creation, with action figures being used as the "prompt" from which to generate images. I've observed this trend coming since the popularity of the FaceApp app exploded. Personally, I'm not a fan of FaceApp altered figure photos, largely because to my eye most of the manipulations seem to be overdone, but that particular app seems to have been accepted, and even embraced, by the majority of the action figure community. Using AI apps to further enhance action figure photos for additional "realism" (or "idealized realism") seems, to me at least, to simply be another step in the direction pioneered by Faceapp.
The line, so to speak, has now become extremely nebulous. How much "Photoshop" is "too much?" How much FaceApp is too much? And now, how much AI Generative Manipulation will be accepted among figure hobbyists? Most of the prototype images used by manufacturers to advertise pre-release figures are digital renderings now, yet we continue to place pre-orders for figures, even though we are often disappointed by the disparity between the pre-order rendering and the actual physical product. Digital enhancement, I believe, is at this point, ingrained in the action figure photography hobby, and any limits set on digitally enhanced images would be completely arbitrary and difficult to identify, let alone enforce.
The images in the original post are extremely well done. I particularly like the second image, with just a hint of "improvement." That's the type of subtle image manipulation the manufacturers are using the sell us the products. It's also a very nice photograph.
Yes -- far beyond what anyone is doing on a "hobby level" with AI art, the possibilities for creating "fake" images that are impossible to differentiate from real images is now infinite. With the advances in AI image generation that are now being introduced, "photographic evidence" is no longer "evidence" of anything. Similarly effective AI is being used to generate video and audio content.