Rant: everyone loves AI image gen but I think hand-painted textures beat it every time

I work with wood inlays and custom signs on the side. Tried using AI to generate patterns for a big oak piece last month. Spent 3 hours tweaking prompts. Got nothing usable. Everything looked muddy or weirdly smooth. No texture, no grain feeling. Switched to hand-painted watercolor textures scanned at 600 dpi. That piece sold for $450. The detail was just better. Real paint has depth AI can't fake. Has anyone else found the old way actually works better for certain projects?

1 comments

1 Comment

xenar141mo ago

Oh man, actually you might be selling AI short a little bit on this one. I get what you mean about hand-painted stuff having that organic feel, but the issue might be with how you're using the tool. Most people don't realize you should run the AI output through a different program to add texture overlays or noise maps after instead of expecting the raw result to look perfect. Like for wood grain specifically, I've had way better luck generating a base pattern then layering actual scanned brush strokes on top in photoshop. It's not really either/or, more like using AI as a starting point then finishing with real techniques.