Every Friday, I have a day off of work that I can spend working on my beloved ThinkPractice Projects. The newest project, PhotoCraft, I only started a couple of weeks ago. Ever since the start of generative AI last year, I was amazed what generative AI could achieve. Using just a small sentence, the most beautiful images could be generated out of nothing. Even more amazed was I, when I discovered that when you could use the newest generative AI from you Apple silicon Mac or even the latest iPads. Suddenly, you did not need to be an expert photographer to make beautiful artwork for you website. Neither did you have to subscribe to photo stock sites and pay for materials made by others. With just your imagination as the limit it seemed, the most stunning images could be generated for free!

I started looking around and already found software that made it possible to run the latest models and create stunning images. However, recreating those images you see online didn’t turn out to be that simple. The tools were technical, and you really need to phrase the prompts well to not get garbage out. Generating pictures with human subject especially proved difficult. Adding to that, I felt a bit at a loss with all the AI lingo. What was a guidance scale and how should it be set? What’s a sampler and which settings should I use. How can I use image to image, etc., etc. It must be possible to make this more simple I thought, and the idea for the PhotoCraft app was born.

Making PhotoCraft a macOS app was also an obvious choice for me. macOS is the operating system long used by creatives. In addition, it provides us developers with a lot of tools out of the box. For instance, complex image processing operations are easily integrated into your app. Also macOS makes it easy to integrate the rest of the operating system features as well. I have been building the PhotoCraft app over the last two weeks and have been already able to integrate generative AI models easily via CoreML. It’s amazing how Apple helps its developers make an idea into reality quickly. A basic app generating images from positive and negative prompts is already working after just a couple of hours of development. I already have a lot ideas which I will be working on in the coming weeks.

If you are interested in generative AI in general and the development of PhotoCraft in specific please stay tuned. In the following weeks, I will keep you posted here about the PhotoCraft development. I’m also planning to write some tutorials on how to use generative AI. I hope the PhotoCraft app will soon help you generate stunning images. I also hope this blog will be the start for you to get involved with generative AI and it will prove a useful resource for learning.