Batching On-Brand Photography with AI, AI User Group San Francisco 08/24

Why I gave this talk

The AI User Group host invited me to share a practical process for creating and refreshing on-brand stock photography. It was my first public talk, and I focused the demo on B2B marketing websites because that is my specialty. Those sites can run to 40-plus pages, each needing imagery that feels related. I designed the workflow around batching because it was the quickest way to create that range while preserving the effect of one photo shoot.

Rebuilding the image live

I used a workplace-management brand whose site had relied on illustrations for years, then generated a new photography direction live in Midjourney. I started with the basics: /imagine, describe, image prompts, and parameters for aspect ratio, chaos, Raw Mode, exclusions, repeats, and permutations. I also showed character references as a way to carry recognizable people into different settings.

The first batch asked for an HR team collaborating at a whiteboard in a tech office. I generated 12 options because a larger batch gives me more faces and compositions to evaluate before refining one. From there, I tested variations, reused selected characters, and changed the setting. I also briefly compared the results with DALL-E in ChatGPT.

One of the generations from the talk — the composition that shaped the multiethnic-range fix below.

What the response told me

The outputs made the limits visible in real time. Midjourney put whiteboard graphics on someone’s shirt, struggled to preserve characters in places, and initially returned people who looked too similar because I had not described the range I wanted. I changed the prompt to ask for a multiethnic group, aiming for a wider range of faces and ages.

That is why I do not treat a generation as a finished asset. Except for an occasional blog cover, I take the result into Figma or Photoshop, edit it, and make it mine. The tools create options quickly; art direction, review, and refinement are what make those options useful to a brand.

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