Hi! Actually, I'm really glad someone brought this up as AI is all over the headlines these days and is such an interesting and exciting area of tech development right now.
I am also happy to discuss my process for creating the image if anyone is curious to know more about it.
As I think many people can tell, and as the poster rightly pointed out, I did use AI in the creation of the image for our holiday cards. I wanted to create a cool image that encapsulated the season and also help capture our Campfire vibe in the moment. But it wasn't quite as simple to create the image as a cleverly crafted prompt into ChatGPT.
Since AI is so new and evolving so quickly, I think that maybe there is some value in sharing my process and how I incorporated it into my workflow, if for no other reason than to know how someone like me might use it right now in the real world instead of some sci-fi future of headlines.
Initially, I had a pretty good idea of the scene I wanted as well as each element I wanted to include in the image. I wanted certain elements included, such as the campfire, the starry sky, the snowy beach, the forest, and the moon because it would have to be nighttime. It is so dark this time of year here in Portland.
So I worked with ChatGPT / DALL-E to rough out some elements and a general scene that was cool and had the right look and feel that I was after. This part takes way longer than I'd like to think, and sometimes you totally strike out completely. But here, I got lucky and had some images in the ballpark of what I wanted to do. But the images you get from DALL-E are pretty small and missing a lot of important details. So they aren't exactly usable for anything without more work.
That's where Photoshop comes into play. I fixed issues I had with the images, scaled and color-corrected them getting to a place where I had the basic image. You can't really go wrong with Photoshop, tried and true
Next, because I'm super curious about using every AI tool I can use these days, I went to Magnific.ai to enhance the image I had from Photoshop. It is a cool service but may be a bit expensive for what they are offering right now, I'm still on the fence about it. Basically, it adds another layer of AI to your image to add more details and change certain elements of the image with a series of sliders. The overall image treatment is cool though because it helps to make the image more coherent again in some weird kind of way, like applying a new finish to the entire image.
I played around with that for a while until I was happy and returned that image to Photoshop for more tweaking. In fact I dropped a couple of different images together and blended them together because there were cool parts of a number of my attempts but never all together. So it was a nice stack of Magnific's output images from that Photoshopped image that were finally worked together. And, of course, more image tweaking and color correcting with Photoshop.
After I got to an image I was happy with, I had to prepare it for the Risograph. I'm not sure everyone is familiar with this, but it is an office duplicator from Japan. It's a cool machine I could go on about for too long. It creates a 'Master' on rice paper and wraps it around a drum that has brightly colored soy-based ink in it. The printing is similar to a screen print or lithograph. But you have to select each color drum individually, and the ink colors are unique to Risograph ie not Pantone.
I tried a few different colorways with the Riso before deciding on a simple four-color take of Aqua, Fluorescent Pink, Yellow, and Black. Each of the colors is half-toned, and the black is 'grain touched,' which is a Riso setting that obscures the dots.
We ran each piece of paper through the Risograph 4 times, one for each color, doing our best to align each color to the previous layers. Because it is such an analog process, there is plenty of room for misalignment, but that is also the charm of the Riso.
The final step was cutting them down to envelope-friendly size, which we did with our guillotine paper cutter and with the old-school rounded corner cuts. Then we flipped them over and gave them some official stamp marks to make them that much cooler.
Anyway, it's a long story, but hopefully, someone finds it a bit interesting.
I really feel like it's an exciting time right now and there are so many new tools that are becoming available so quickly. My approach is to try them out and see what they can do and if they work in my own workflow. Maybe they will, or maybe they won't; either way is totally cool. Since I already love gadgets and technology, I really enjoy playing with them and folding them into my creative workflow when it makes sense. I don't think these tools will replace my love of analog processes anytime soon, but luckily, I don't have to choose just one or the other. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! Turned out much longer than I expected
I was like, 'Yeah it is gray, it's Titanium' 
So yeah, in the begining it really wasn't as popular as I initially expected it to be. The good news is that since then it has slowly developed a low-key cult following, which is honestly maybe the best outcome after all. Anyway, glad to hear you like it too!
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It's basically an Ara with more warmth and a touch more energy, almost the same graph with differences I boil down to a phase shift from the measurement rig.
