Workshops
Unleash your creativity as you learn how to craft pictures using the latest AI imaging tools and techniques, turning your creations into a finished, printed storybook.
There are no available registration dates at this time.
Learn how to craft pictures using the latest AI imaging tools – and create an illustrated storybook – in this fun, 5-day workshop that will teach you all of the ins-and-outs of Stable Diffusion, one of the leading AI image generators. Each student will bring a written story to this course and, over the course of the week, will use Stable Diffusion to create enough images to illustrate that story. Then we’ll color correct the images and lay them out, alongside the text, into a finished, printed book. Along the way you will cast your fellow students as the characters of your story, then you’ll learn how to shoot photos of those actors and train the AI so that it can consistently render images that include them. You will also learn how to direct Stable Diffusion to give you what you want as you dive into learning prompt engineering, in-painting, outpainting, img2img, embeddings, prompt libraries, ControlNet, OpenPose, LORA, DreamBooth, and much much more.
You don’t need to know much to enjoy this course but the basics of what makes a good, effective photo will certainly help, as will some basic image editing skills. “But I’m not a writer” is no excuse as there are a number of tricks we can use to help you come up with a story, including simply having an AI chatbot write one for you! AIs such as Stable Diffusion are quickly going to become major factors in many different fields. This is your chance to learn the fundamentals of how they work, what you can expect from them, and how you can utilize them in your professional and personal projects.
All images copyright Ben Long.
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Instructor: Ben Long
Ben Long is a San Francisco-based photographer, writer, and teacher. He is the author of over two dozen books on digital photography and digital video. For years he covered photography and graphics software for such magazines as Macworld, MacUser, MacWeek and CreativePro.com. His photography clients have included 20th Century Fox, Blue Note Records, Global Business Network, the San Francisco Jazz Festival, the Pickle Family Circus, and Grammy-nominated jazz musicians Don Byron and Dafnis Prieto. He has taught and lectured on photography around the world, including workshops at the Santa Reparata International School of the Arts in Florence and a class for imaging engineers at Apple, Inc. He occasionally dabbles in computer programming and has written image editing utilities that are used by National Geographic, the British Museum, and the White House.