Continuing my experiments with Adobe Firefly, this time using it to colorize my official portrait from the year I served as president of the Atlanta Jaycees, 1997-1998. Taken at a studio in Buckhead, this accompanied my monthly column in the newsletter we sent out. My theme for that year was “Challenge yourselves. Get involved, Atlanta!”
Our region director, Sal Lucido, who was also a past president of the chapter, asked why I didn’t smile and I said that at the time, I thought I was smiling. Perhaps a wide, toothy grin would have been more noticeable.
For the first go around, I told Firefly to colorize the image but not alter it and I supplied my hair and eye color. I recalled that the suit was grey and just went with the default on a white shirt. I still have the tie, but let Adobe make the best guess on the color, prompting it that the tie was mostly black. I’m pretty sure that from the waist down, I was wearing jeans.
I misremembered that the squares on the tie were red, so I added that to the prompt.
Next pass, I muted the red and produced what I thought was a reasonable recreation but I was wrong.
Since I still have the tie, I did what I should have done in the first place and checked the colors. As can be seen, my memory from thirty plus years ago was a bit off. There was red, just not everywhere I thought it was.
This finally yielded a reasonable colorization. The suit may not be exactly right but unlike the tie, I no longer have that, nor the glasses, which, I recall, were tortoise shell. I believe I donated those to the Lion’s Club many years ago.
Having resolved the color problem, I decided to add a more realistic background and used the AI function in Photoshop to create several options for wood paneling. I settled on these two.
Deleting the background left a noticeable line around the photo, so I inserted a solid white layer just above the paneling and adjusted the transparency of it to compensate. There’s probably an easier way to fix it but my expertise is still a work in progress.
The finished products! They still look like posed portraits, but the colors came out reasonably well.
One more with an outdoor setting, generated in Photoshop Express.
Someone once asked me what color my eyes were and I told her, “Blue.” She said, “Yeah, but what do they call it?” I replied, “Blue.”
