Generations and generations and generations and generations...

I redesigned our (extended) family newsletter this month. I figured that since I was changing the publication frequency from two times a year down to one time a year we could do with a good redesign as well (or at least a mediocre redesign). I decided I'd use this picture of my grandma's family standing in age order—from my great-grandfather and great-grandmother to their oldest son, Loren, on down through eleven (living*) children to their youngest, Ila June—in the header of the newsletter somehow. 

My grandma is standing just behind Ila June. 

* Mary Beth passed away from diphtheria as a toddler. She would have been the fourth youngest.

Anyway, I thought I would use Adobe's new AI generative fill feature to see if I could extend the picture in one direction or the other to use it in the header. Just, like, add some trees or something to the left, fade to green...something.

This was a bad idea.

First I asked AI to extend the background with trees that match the background of the photo and, uh...it was a little scary...

And then I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried again...but the results were...haunting...

I had that one troubling spot, obviously, where I simply couldn't get the computer to fill in the background with trees. Too many ghostly figures wanted to be in the frame.

This is kind of close to what I wanted to achieve, but I wasn't quite satisfied with the results...

...so I decided to try extending the other direction and, well, that was worse...

...so ultimately I just stuck the almost-original photo in a circle in the middle of the header (I kept the arm AI generated for my great-grandfather, even though his hand is a little wonky).