-: In this lesson, I wanna do a bit of a case study on some
of the recent work that I've done with Midjourney.
So let's dive into what we have now.
What I wanna talk about
is actually creating the course image or course thumbnail
for this actual course that you're watching.
So I wanna just go through in a little bit
of an unedited fashion, the entire creation process
of the course thumbnail.
So what I started off initially doing was experimenting
with how Midjourney was gonna take a base photo.
This is a photo we have of Benza and putting that in
and typing in something like portrait of a Marvel character.
And actually before we really get into this, the idea
that we had was for our course image is
to have us both in the photo
and our faces normally as they are, but the outfit
or the costume that we were wearing,
rather than it being everyday clothes,
it would be like a cool superhero or an astronaut
or just something really eye catching and different.
So this is the process that I kind of went through.
I was first just experimenting here.
So we have our base image, put it in,
and I put just a little bit of a prompt,
portrait of a Marvel character.
These are kind of interesting. It's cool.
It definitely changes his face a lot. It's not very useful.
I liked the background and the coloring
and just the overall tone of this one.
Of course, he does not look like this at all.
So I was thinking, okay,
maybe we Photoshop our faces on top of the character.
That'll be something cool.
And I just kept going in
and reiterating the different outputs,
but I wasn't really getting anything I was liking.
So I tried a few different things.
I tried the word anime,
I tried the word heroic, epic portraits.
Some of these got really strange,
so it was remixing a little bit too much.
And that's where I turned down the stylization.
I wanted it to do actually less to the image itself,
but still was getting way different of an output.
So let's scroll further down
and see when I started trying other things, well I thought
to myself, okay, rather than telling it a character, maybe
that's why it's changing it too much.
Maybe I talk about the lighting
and it'll put Benza in a cool environment.
The ones that had popped out, still not doing it.
I tried some other photos
and as you could see, you know, there's different styles,
but none of this was very useful.
Then I thought, okay, well maybe we take photos that we have
of ourselves and we use our photo not edited in Midjourney,
but we put ourselves in a really cool background.
So I typed in a wide shot of a minimal, modern,
colorful office with glowing technology
and it started popping out some cool stuff.
I thought these were pretty cool.
And this is kind of the process we were going
through mentally of like, okay, this,
let's go after this idea.
Okay, this isn't gonna work. Let's go after this idea.
This isn't gonna work.
I even actually stepped away from Midjourney
and I brought it into Dall-E too.
And I thought, huh, maybe I can do in painting
and actually paint on top of our outfit and do something.
But I was having issues with that too as well.
So I was actually gonna abandon this idea
and I was like, well, maybe we'll just do more
of a standard course image.
So I continued to generate some cool backgrounds
and I thought, okay, I'll save these.
These are the high quality upscaled ones
that I'll save for later.
I thought this one was really cool,
especially if let's say Benza is on this side,
I'm on this side.
The color scheme is already unique
and it splits the photo in half.
So that's kind of cool.
And then I started with this,
and this is kind of I think the biggest breakthrough.
I went ahead and we shot a new photo of ourselves.
And the other thing that I did notice
about where we started off was this background
is influencing a lot of how the actual image is.
So I thought, hmm, maybe it's gonna be better to mask out
and cut out the background, which is exactly
what I did here, and then bring that in.
So some of our outputs are getting a little bit better.
It's not taking into account the background, it's just me
and a solid color shirt.
So if you are doing this as well too,
I'd recommend not having a shirt with logos,
not having a shirt with shapes.
But these are a lot easier already for me
to simply mask
and put my unedited face on a great looking costume
because the simplicity
and then actually here's where we start to get better.
But because the simplicity of the input
is so much more clean, it's doing a great job
of maintaining the integrity of the base image
'cause there's so much less complexity.
So I was starting to get really happy
and it actually reinvigorated, okay,
I think this is actually possible.
I think we can actually go forward with this idea.
So I was getting different outputs, saving the ones
where I liked the lighting
and I liked the outfit of, you know,
the characters that it was developing.
And once I got a few that I liked, I then uploaded a photo
with Benza with a background that was cut out.
But I noticed something interesting.
Because it takes things so literally,
we can look and see his pose here.
He's got one arm forward, one arm down,
and it didn't actually translate very well
into the output images because it just didn't look as clean.
So that's something else to keep in mind
that it's not gonna only take into account
what you're wearing, the backgrounds,
but it's gonna do a pretty good job of replicating the pose
that you have in your photo.
So here we're starting to get closer
to the output we're wanting.
We have more of the Marvel superhero style.
I think this is actually the final output
that I ended up going with.
Let's go ahead and see.
Just tons of reiteration, tons of different outputs,
really just looking for the right amount of detail,
the right lighting, the right coloring.
I knew that because we were gonna be standing side by side,
I wanted to have like contrasting colors of our outfit.
So ideally a blue costume standing right next
to me in a red costume.
So I downloaded all of the best outputs from Midjourney
for this specific pose.
And because like I mentioned before,
the pose of Benza with one hand forward and one hand down,
I could tell I was not gonna give an output I liked.
I actually, funnily enough, I uploaded a second photo
of me with the thought that, okay,
I'll have a different pose and this'll be Benza's outfit
and I'll actually put, or Benza's costume and posture
and then I'll put his face on it later in post-production.
So that's this process.
I'm pretty sure this is the output we used.
It's great because it's red,
which contrasts the other output that I want to use,
which is blue.
The positioning is nice.
There's actually really nice heroic lighting.
So I was just looking at a few stylistic factors
and went through a lot of different outputs
and figured, okay, well let's put 'em in a cool backdrop.
I was thinking of the Marvel style.
So I think I even started outputting some hangers
with spaceships in the background,
which we didn't actually end up using
'cause it was too complex for a course thumbnail.
But what I want to do next
is just quickly show you the actual photo edit
that I did to create the final product.
Perfect. So what I have is all my elements.
So we have the main base images that we started with,
all the different outfits that I liked,
that I thought were potential contenders
for the final export, the logos that I wanted
to overlay and have on the course thumbnail,
and then the potential backgrounds that, like I mentioned,
we actually didn't end up using.
So let's hop over
and see what this actually looked like to get this image.
'Cause clearly if we look at our outfits,
these are not our faces.
So we had to do a little bit of editing magic
to get to this point.
So let's go ahead and break this down quickly.
And in After Effects, we can go ahead
and see the different layers that we have going on here.
So we have our logos that we added
to the course image,
and then we're gonna have our different layers
of bringing together the different elements
of taking our base image and basically Photoshopping
and editing that on top of our Midjourney outputs.
So I did the same thing for Benza and myself.
It took a little bit of fine tuning,
a little bit of changing things around.
But once you add all these elements together
of having a nice background
and replacing things
that you don't want from the Midjourney photo,
you can actually get a pretty cool final edit.
And this is what the final version looked like. Pretty cool.
I think it really conveys the original idea we had,
which was for both of us to be looking directly into camera
and wearing Marvel type heroic outfits
that would look interesting for students.
And this would not have been possible
without the use of Midjourney.
So I hope you gain some insights from this case study
and I will see you in the next lesson.