A digital tribute to Jennell Jaquays

After my friend's Jennell's passing I went into a slump from writing. Just thinking how one moment she was here and the other she wasn't ate away my thoughts and I began thinking what way I could contribute to her remembrance.

I began gathering what photos I could find online about Jennell and I came across a few of them that the quality wasn't that good, either because of blurry out of focus shots or grainy. So I reached out to my friend Jesus Pacheco who I knew was dabbling with Stable Diffusion, for some help to see if we could clear some of those negative attributes on those digital images.

The process began with doing some research of Jennell's art and life, delving into her illustrations and work to the world of video games and tabletop role playing games.

We went and found other photos taken from different angles, and other illustrations of her as an artist, which helped feed the Artificial Intelligence LLM we were able to start creating her digital portrait.

Using Stable Difussion and a web UI called Fooocus and a large language model called Juggernaut XL v7, Jesus started configuring the engine so that it created a photorealistic portrait dressed in a bit of a fantasy setting, like those you could see in games like Baldur's Gate 3, Icewind Dale and other CRPGS. The research images were fed into Fooocus in the image input part.

The first images that came out were surprisingly good, for a raw version 0.1 of the portrait. Jesus explained that "Fooocus has an addition that completes the prompt even more to give it touches of realism, etc., but in this case I used 3 selections: "fooocus masterpiece", "Fooocus photorealistic", "fooocus negative", plus the prompt that said something as well as "A beautiful mage in a dungeon, with magic artifacts" among others such as "a heavenly portrait of a blonde game designer".

As part of the creation process, there were a lot of failed attempts, there was no consistency in the image, the face didn't look that similar, so we moved to the third step. I opened what is known as FaceFusion, an interface with models for face swapping (said in previous newsletters). The reference image was chosen, the target image, and I began the optimization so that her face was just like the original or at least close enough.

While the initial output was great, there were some issues with the final resolution of the image. Some pixels were bloated or bold and they softened the image too much, made it look fake, in a bad way. After some research we found that Magnific.ai made by Javier López was the tool we needed to use in order to bring the image to the level we wanted to see, and the results were beyond impressive.

After we got the output from Magnific.ai, we started to notice that upscaled image had way too many freckles that didn't exist. So we loaded up Photoshop, added the finishing touches, like a process called frequency separation, Jesus masterfully managed to to get out the tones and lines that were extra in this image, editing every flaw we found on the photo, getting to the final image that we gave Rebecca Heineman (Jennell's wife) to use for the wake.

It was an honor to have worked on this piece alongside my friend Jesus and demonstrate the potential that artificial intelligence has, but more importantly, give my friend a sendoff in a way she probably would have admired herself.

I am going to miss her, very much.