Scottsdale, Arizona.

Scottsdale Arizona is a place where Jaguars, Mercedes, and Porsches are as common as traffic cones. But during our winter stay, on a recent visit to the grocery store, we parked near the most unusual Porsche I’ve ever seen. It reminded me of a poem written in 1895 by Gelett Burgess. Here is my version:

I’d never seen a purple Porsche,
I never thought I’d see one,
But I can tell you anyhow,
I’d rather not own me one.

OK, I’m no poet so I tender my apologies to Mr. Burgess and his Purple Cow.

About the photo: I captured the image with my Samsung S23U with a quick snap, no pro mode, just a jpg image. An SUV was parked directly in front of the purple Porsche, so I cropped the image tight. Then I tried to use the content-aware healing brush in Lightroom in an attempt to remove the remaining rear of the SUV. It left a weird purple blob in front of the car. I then exported the image to Photoshop and found that using Generative Fill, that tool wanted to create a different type of vehicle in front of the Porsche. All three images put three different vehicles there. I’d left the Generative Fill dialog empty, instead of indicating I wanted the selected area erased.

I then decided to use Luminar Neo’s Gen-Erase module on the image to see how it would do. Since the Gen-Erase module needs the image opened directly from Luminar Neo instead of being exported from Lightroom, I exported a second copy of the image for safety and opened that image in Neo. Instead of using a selection tool like Adobe products, Neo uses a mask. I masked the “offending” SUV and clicked the Gen-Erase tool. The SUV all but disappeared. Gen-Erase created an extension to the building on the right edge of the image and brought the far right light pole down to the ground where the AI tool completely imagined a parking island and entrance to the building.

The mask I created wasn’t quite perfect and there were a couple of artifacts of the SUV directly in front of the curve of the front fender of the Porsche. I used the standard Erase tool in Neo to touch up the fender, and the pavement and remove a couple of pieces of litter on the ground.

If you click on the opening image, it will link you to the 2K HD version of the final photograph. Using Pinch-Zoom on your device, you can enlarge the area in front of the building. You’ll see that it’s really an artist’s representation of the building’s facade and plantings. Yet when viewing the entire image, the AI creation is all but unnoticeable in the background.

I finished the image by increasing the contrast, structure, and vibrance from within the single Enhanced AI tool and imported it into Lightroom Classic for the addition of the watermark and filing in my master catalog.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner