How We Used AI to Put Our Shirts on the World’s Most Iconic Golf Courses

November 30, 2025 3 min read

If you’ve been on our site lately, you may have noticed something new: bold, vibrant images of golfers wearing Subculture Golf shirts—standing proudly on some of the most legendary golf courses on Earth.

Pebble Beach. St Andrews. Augusta. Bandon Dunes. TPC Sawgrass.
Yeah… we went big.

And if you’re wondering how we pulled off such realistic shots without flying a full creative crew around the world, here’s the honest answer:

We used AI. Really good AI.
And we’re proud of it.

Why We Did It (And What We Wanted to Avoid)

We’re a small brand with a huge personality. We don’t have PGA TOUR budgets (yet), and we don’t want to rely on stiff stock photos that look like a corporate brochure.

Our vision was simple:

Show our actual shirts in real golf settings
Keep the images artistic, clean, and unmistakably Subculture
Avoid generic AI weirdness
Build something unique for our customers and brand story

Traveling a full team to famous courses around the world wasn’t realistic.
AI gave us the freedom to bring our shirts to life exactly how we imagined them.

A Key Detail: The Shirts in the Images Are 100% Real

This part matters.

While the golfer silhouette and course backgrounds were created with AI, the shirts themselves started as real photographs.

We photographed every polo by hand in a small studio setup, carefully lit and positioned for accuracy. Then:

We removed the background
We cleaned up the edges
We prepped the shirt so AI could use it as a reference

Only after the shirt images were perfected did we feed them into the AI generation workflow.

So what you’re seeing on our site isn’t a fantasy polo or a hallucinated pattern — it’s our real product, digitally placed into a stunning golf backdrop.

The AI golfer is fake.
The AI course is fake.
But the shirt is 100% real.

That’s the blend we wanted.

How We Created the Images

1. Start With the Course

Each scene began with a highly specific prompt describing lighting, camera angle, and the signature features of the course:

Pebble Beach cliffs
The Swilcan Bridge at St Andrews
Augusta’s blooming azaleas
The dunes at Bandon

Realistic, but subtle — the shirt stays the star.

2. Add the Golfer Silhouette

We generated a clean, natural-looking golfer model with realistic posture and proportions. Getting this right took dozens of iterations (AI loves to invent extra elbows).

3. Insert the Real Shirt

The pre-edited shirt photo was mapped into the image so it fit naturally on the golfer’s body.
We made sure the colors, folds, and patterns stayed true to the actual garment.

4. Tune for Desktop & Mobile

Each course required:

A 1920px desktop format
A 600px mobile format

Mobile often needed zooming out so the golfer wasn’t cropped at the knees (AI is fantastic at chopping off feet for no reason).

5. Final Polish

After the AI generation, we cleaned small artifacts and adjusted brightness and shadows in GIMP to ensure each banner looked crisp, modern, and polished.

AI Didn’t Replace Creativity — It Unlocked It

We still planned the angles, chose the compositions, refined the lighting, corrected all the strange artifacts, and ensured brand consistency.

AI didn’t do the work for us.
AI let us do more work, faster, with more creativity.

Think of it like a launch monitor or a fancy driver:
It doesn’t swing for you. It just helps you swing better.

What’s Next?

This is just the start.

We’re exploring:

Action shots/videos
Seasonal themed banners
Composite scenes with multiple golfers
Animated homepage loops
Easter eggs hidden on the site

Go check out the homepage and tell us which course image is your favorite.

Stay bold. Stay weird.
⛳⚡
Subculture Golf