AI-assisted imaging can be an inventive and very engaging process, capable of producing stunning visual creations, we all know that. Sadly, it remains far from being accepted as a proper art form by the traditional artistic community. I myself come from such a community (speaking of digital art), but had no reservations about switching to the new AI imaging tools. After being pretty involved with AI-assisted art making for longer than two years, I came to the conclusion that introduction of a new imaging standard might be necessary, a standard that could help AI-assisted creations and their authors to gain more attention - and hopefully respect - from digital artists of the traditional kind.
Since making high and ultra high resolution images has long become my specialty and area of expertise, I would like to introduce such a standard first for this category of digital works. Not to make this blog post too long, I will just list the two main criteria that in my mind should define such a standard. An AI-assisted image can be regarded as a HyperPixel if:
it has at least 8K pixels in each dimension or minimum 64 MP in total
it features a fine, meaningful detail across the entire image most of which is a result of manual editing (also known as ‘inpainting’) or other form of curated refinement
The 1st criterion is a simple (but high) technical threshold to define the Hyper category. The 2nd one is meant to prevent routinely upscaled images - including those upscaled using the most advanced and expensive upscaling platforms such as magnific.ai and Topaz Labs - from qualifying automatically. It should also help such artworks to be recognized by the traditional artistic community.
To illustrate what kind of creations can be defined as HyperPixel, I will share with you a few examples from my AI-assisted image creation library (most of them are still awaiting to be published here). The first one is The stage angel demo artwork featured in the previous journal post on quality upscaling. It’s a result of a multi-stage process of upscaling, refining and manual inpainting which I use to demonstrate the techniques from my kitchen, so to speak.
The full 16K (165 MP) version is too large to be shown on ArtStation efficiently, so I'm inviting you to see it on EasyZoom (no logging in required):
https://www.easyzoom.com/embed/0192621b1d5f4a5fac9e51727760e457
Another one is Flowers and butterflies:
the full 16K (144 MP) version of which is also available on EasyZoom:
https://www.easyzoom.com/embed/64c502581bc140ffb37a810c5bb687f4
In case you can’t be bothered clicking away to EasyZoom, below are a few 1:1 scale fragments from the master image; they should give you an idea about the level of manually impainted detail I am talking about.
Flowers and butterflies, fragment 1 (0.7% of the main image's pixel space):
Flowers and butterflies, fragment 2 (0.5% of the main image's pixel space):
Flowers and butterflies, fragment 3 (1.2% of the main image's pixel space):
Many more are still to come, so stay tuned! And of course, your reactions and comments will be much appreciated.