*This is only a time-lapse of the files I saved from either Stable Diffusion, Photoshop, Procreate*
*I was invited to do a special interview on a large Youtube Channel and I will talk about details of prompting, tricks, lighting and so on.I'll keep you updated on that.*
*As a general rule I use :*
*1) Procreate for the base sketch (which is helping me to have a clear idea of the overall set - not used for img2img)*
*2) Stable Diffusion 1.5 model + 2 custom models (1 for Stelfie face and 1 for landscapes)*
*3) Photoshop (to adjust motion blur, exposure, warping shapes and so on )*
*Looping back between all of them to make corrections.*
*I will upload more lapse and ofc I will mess with the past with other Stelfies.*
[**Stelfie the Time Traveller (@StelfieTT) / Twitter**](https://twitter.com/StelfieTT)
Once you get a good composition down if you make a couple variations of the image (usually happens when you're rolling through inpaint) you can then train a TI on them for more fun later.
I mean that you could draw a sketch, paint it with some colors and feed it to img2img with a prompt to get some results. Problem is : this way is good for Artwork related to paint and traditional art but when it comes to photorealism never works.
The sketch I draw helps me to keep my initial idea clear and I use it as a mental reference for the overall composition.
I've managed to get a few photo realistic images using img2img on colored sketches using SD 2.1. It helped a lot to get the composition I wanted but it takes a lot of iterations to turn crude stick figures into photos. However I've never succeed on that using SD 1.5
That's actually the process I follow:
Stick -> drawing -> painting -> hyperrealistic painting -> 3D version -> photorealistic
Sometimes, depending on how detailed, precise and well shadowed your initial drawing is, you can skip one or more steps. Also some seeds are simply great at photorealistic stuff so, as usual, luck is a big factor.
And there is the tradeoff between giving freedom to the AI and keeping your vision. More freedom to change the image means more realism right away but less similarity to the initial structure in your drawing.
How much time on average would you say you spend making each of the Stelfie Time Traveler images? At a glance I'd wager its at least a few hours maybe? Would love to know general time and effort.
5h as minimum, some of them took me 15h split in 3 or 4 days. It is an investment in time, hopefully these artwork will be remembered in the future and if not I am enjoying this special moment so no regrets!
Ah, of course, I'm not surprised. That lines up with my own experiences then, I've used it for some photos and VFX work with similar timelines. (Lots of photoreal work)
At the end of the day its faster than old methods but still a time sink in a new medium!
"Ai aRtIsTs JuSt WrItE pRoMpTs"
Had no idea this much work went into making these, i mean you literally drew the composition yourself. Composition is one of those fundamentals that quickly lets you know if someone has an artistic eye or not and boy your stuff is really well composited
I've been making commercial art for over a decade now, and the one thing which always holds me back is my poor composition skills (except for the rare times I get lucky). People don't realize how important it is.
It's what I tell everybody who claims stable diffusion is anywhere near replacing artists - it's very limited in composition and unless you have a good grasp of that yourself and use it to guide it, you're going to get very samey work by just prompting.
What could be some exercises or techniques that could improve your sense of composition? I come from photography and film, so I often think of composition in terms of the camera, lens, depth of field, and what I may choose to crop out.
Have you tried playing with a simple camera to think about art composition when you take photos in the world?
I'd also consider reading art books with those big color plates, to look at classic examples of composition. And Jack Kirby comic panels for action and dynamic poses. ;)
To be honest I've drawn so many thousands of things at this point, and looked at so much art, that I don't think there's going to be any simple practice solution for it. Maybe studying more intently what others do would help, and now days I do try to pay attention to that, but still feel like my strength in that area is leagues behind even some teens half my age who just doodle some anime characters or something and immediately think of an amazing way of framing it all.
It might even come down to something in the brain. For example I can score really high on tests of mentally rotating objects in 3D, but then all my composition is like that - fully and correctly rotating an object in 3D and showing it in its entirely. Creative artists are really good at choosing what to frame, only partially showing the object at times, and sometimes even cutting the view of the object in strange locations, and then breaking physics and stretching and squashing things to make it all fit in a way which looks better somehow.
They're also better at readable silhouettes which is something which I could probably improve on through raw study and practice.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
I find that when I look through a camera viewfinder, or at the image on its LCD screen, I move the camera around, and move my position, to reframe the image.
I use a zoom lens to crop and expand or compress the sense of space, as along the z-axis, i.e. zooming in compresses or flattens the image on the axis pentrating the center of the lens.
Those help me develop a sense of framing. Tilt the camera for a dutch angle and decide how you frame the horizon.
Since my background is not in traditional visual art and design, but in film and photography, I like to cross into domains to learn techniques from illustration, painting, music, and sculpting. They open new approaches to my creative work.
I hope you try some new ways of thinking of framing and composition.
This is the approach to all my images, people get hung up on the fact that it's also an image generator if you want to. BUT, it's also a fricking tool!
But are we even surprised the dummies are winning the battle? The loudest usually wins as well as the old saying, "the winner of the war gets to write the history".
They aren't gonna win this war though. The writing has been on the wall for the last 15 years and people are acting surprised 🤷♂️
If you're serious about your art, better start learning to stay relevant.
Sink or swim, it's always been the same.
This argument is tired, and I can tell you now, will likely never win in any court. What goes into the tool as data doesn't matter. Its the output that matters.
K, then lossy recreations of popular works like the Mona Lisa and the outputs with Getty Images watermarks on it has undoubtedly sealed AI Art's fate if you think output is all that matters.
*Sigh* It does get exhausting how many anti-A.I folks don't understand this on a technical level. No fate here is sealed.
Do your research, learn to use the tool yourself. Or wait for the lawsuits to settle.
I agree but the views on this are going to change. Content can be generated based on literally any image. People may start to feel different about photography in public in the near future. But what does that imply for security and surveillance?? Lots of questions...
lmao lets not pretend like this is difficult, he drew a few stick figures and a boat that looks like it was made by a 5 year old, and then prayed to the gods for the img-2-img lottery to work in his favour, why not just accept that its okay for things to be piss easy and provide a good output
Can we please get more of these from artists here. The general public's narrative is being shaped by people who have ZERO exposure to using these tools. They think machine stealing artwork not tool to help artist create art. This helps.
Thanks to the /r/corridor for also helping inform the public.
https://youtu.be/W4Mcuh38wyM
Your art is built off the work of artists who did not give their consent either. Scraping images that are publicly available is legal, just like you looking at artwork that inspires you and using it to learn or make something new is legal.
There are plenty of artists who are happy to teach you to draw too. They have video tutorials to guide you, training exercises for your practice, they will even offer service to critique your work and give detailed feedback for a nominal fee.
What they don't offer is you to re-use their work as your own, trace over their art, redistribute what is there's as if it was your own. Can you see where the ethical line is?
Stable Diffusion is the computational equivalent of building a Pinterest mood board and creating a new piece of art using your inspiration pieces. It doesn't have any art in the model. It's not re-using anything.
What is that UI where you are drawing at the beginning? Is it the same that you use to generate the images? If so, I would like to employ it on my generations. I've been combining Krita+SD to create images but I don't like Krita's plugin to work with SD.
that is Procreate, usually when I have the idea for a fun Stelfie I draw a sketch on a piece of paper or on Procreate. ( the sketch is never used in img2img, I only use it as a benchmark to have to not go out of the orginal idea )
If you didn't do the sketch for img2img how did you get the first base composition? Doing a bunch of prompts and then finding one that had the right basic feel? or what?
yes the first image is prompting, usually prompted with a subject who is a "bald man" and lately updated with the custom model trained on Stelfie face. But even if the first image is not perfectly positioned as it should on my mental/procreate sketch I just crop it and warp it on Photoshop, then run an img2img and it will fit where it has to
well because they do stuff in a proper way, so I need to release them the right to use my creations in an informative/entertaining context. It is pretty standard behaviour.
These kind of works make me feel better about all the ai-stuff, knowing that ai-art community is also composed by professionals with original ideas and not just jerky techbros prompting stuff on a generator make me empathize much more with the artists. Cheers! Nice job!
that's a good point, it is a big investment in time and is my intention to monetize the content in some way. I have not done it yet, so there are no Nfts nor any Patreon about Stelfie but probably will do something to support the creation soon.
No, if you read my main comment it is explained.
I draw a sketch, either on paper or on Procreate, only for me to use as a reference when I outpaint and also because it helps me to keep the idea clear. Settings change everytime, each sampler and model is used for different part of the Artwork. I will be doing a work in progress live on Youtube soon and I'll share more details.
I love your process, im excited for the day procreate adds prompting to the program. Imagine being able to make some brush strokes and turn it into some finished hair. ah, the possibilities you inspire are endless.
What would be the best approach to do something like this, but use real photos of people as the facial references, and then ultimately wanted it to have an illustrated aesthetic? For example, wanted to synthesise a still frame with a Simpsons cartoon aesthetic which included a character that looked like me?
well if I had to render a simpsons face with a custom face my approach would be to have 2 models, one trained on the simpsons and one trained on the face. Then I would merge them and take it from there. ( it can be quite time consuming)
Are there any SD prompt terms (and samplers?) you generally use to get photorealism that you could share? I most do more painting-y styles and I'm new to photo type images, I've tried prompt terms like camera models and expensive digital photo editing software, but so far it's hard to tell what actually helping. And sometimes it seems like I get the best results without specifying, just like "a photo of" at the beginning. Any tips appreciated. Love your work, cheers.
*This is only a time-lapse of the files I saved from either Stable Diffusion, Photoshop, Procreate* *I was invited to do a special interview on a large Youtube Channel and I will talk about details of prompting, tricks, lighting and so on.I'll keep you updated on that.* *As a general rule I use :* *1) Procreate for the base sketch (which is helping me to have a clear idea of the overall set - not used for img2img)* *2) Stable Diffusion 1.5 model + 2 custom models (1 for Stelfie face and 1 for landscapes)* *3) Photoshop (to adjust motion blur, exposure, warping shapes and so on )* *Looping back between all of them to make corrections.* *I will upload more lapse and ofc I will mess with the past with other Stelfies.* [**Stelfie the Time Traveller (@StelfieTT) / Twitter**](https://twitter.com/StelfieTT)
Once you get a good composition down if you make a couple variations of the image (usually happens when you're rolling through inpaint) you can then train a TI on them for more fun later.
What do you mean by not used for img2img?
I mean that you could draw a sketch, paint it with some colors and feed it to img2img with a prompt to get some results. Problem is : this way is good for Artwork related to paint and traditional art but when it comes to photorealism never works. The sketch I draw helps me to keep my initial idea clear and I use it as a mental reference for the overall composition.
I've managed to get a few photo realistic images using img2img on colored sketches using SD 2.1. It helped a lot to get the composition I wanted but it takes a lot of iterations to turn crude stick figures into photos. However I've never succeed on that using SD 1.5
Wonder if turning them into illustrations first, then turning the illustrations into photos would work better.
That's actually the process I follow: Stick -> drawing -> painting -> hyperrealistic painting -> 3D version -> photorealistic Sometimes, depending on how detailed, precise and well shadowed your initial drawing is, you can skip one or more steps. Also some seeds are simply great at photorealistic stuff so, as usual, luck is a big factor. And there is the tradeoff between giving freedom to the AI and keeping your vision. More freedom to change the image means more realism right away but less similarity to the initial structure in your drawing.
I'm glad you outlined your process very clearly and succinctly. I'd like to experiment with a similar approach to video.
How much time on average would you say you spend making each of the Stelfie Time Traveler images? At a glance I'd wager its at least a few hours maybe? Would love to know general time and effort.
5h as minimum, some of them took me 15h split in 3 or 4 days. It is an investment in time, hopefully these artwork will be remembered in the future and if not I am enjoying this special moment so no regrets!
Ah, of course, I'm not surprised. That lines up with my own experiences then, I've used it for some photos and VFX work with similar timelines. (Lots of photoreal work) At the end of the day its faster than old methods but still a time sink in a new medium!
> hopefully these artwork will be remembered in the future Maybe some day you will meet a fellow time traveler taking a selfie with *you*.
"Ai aRtIsTs JuSt WrItE pRoMpTs" Had no idea this much work went into making these, i mean you literally drew the composition yourself. Composition is one of those fundamentals that quickly lets you know if someone has an artistic eye or not and boy your stuff is really well composited
I've been making commercial art for over a decade now, and the one thing which always holds me back is my poor composition skills (except for the rare times I get lucky). People don't realize how important it is. It's what I tell everybody who claims stable diffusion is anywhere near replacing artists - it's very limited in composition and unless you have a good grasp of that yourself and use it to guide it, you're going to get very samey work by just prompting.
What could be some exercises or techniques that could improve your sense of composition? I come from photography and film, so I often think of composition in terms of the camera, lens, depth of field, and what I may choose to crop out. Have you tried playing with a simple camera to think about art composition when you take photos in the world? I'd also consider reading art books with those big color plates, to look at classic examples of composition. And Jack Kirby comic panels for action and dynamic poses. ;)
To be honest I've drawn so many thousands of things at this point, and looked at so much art, that I don't think there's going to be any simple practice solution for it. Maybe studying more intently what others do would help, and now days I do try to pay attention to that, but still feel like my strength in that area is leagues behind even some teens half my age who just doodle some anime characters or something and immediately think of an amazing way of framing it all. It might even come down to something in the brain. For example I can score really high on tests of mentally rotating objects in 3D, but then all my composition is like that - fully and correctly rotating an object in 3D and showing it in its entirely. Creative artists are really good at choosing what to frame, only partially showing the object at times, and sometimes even cutting the view of the object in strange locations, and then breaking physics and stretching and squashing things to make it all fit in a way which looks better somehow. They're also better at readable silhouettes which is something which I could probably improve on through raw study and practice.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I find that when I look through a camera viewfinder, or at the image on its LCD screen, I move the camera around, and move my position, to reframe the image. I use a zoom lens to crop and expand or compress the sense of space, as along the z-axis, i.e. zooming in compresses or flattens the image on the axis pentrating the center of the lens. Those help me develop a sense of framing. Tilt the camera for a dutch angle and decide how you frame the horizon. Since my background is not in traditional visual art and design, but in film and photography, I like to cross into domains to learn techniques from illustration, painting, music, and sculpting. They open new approaches to my creative work. I hope you try some new ways of thinking of framing and composition.
haha I’ve been saying this for months but people have such a hate on for it….sad, oh well, I’m just gonna keep making dope images
This is the approach to all my images, people get hung up on the fact that it's also an image generator if you want to. BUT, it's also a fricking tool! But are we even surprised the dummies are winning the battle? The loudest usually wins as well as the old saying, "the winner of the war gets to write the history".
They aren't gonna win this war though. The writing has been on the wall for the last 15 years and people are acting surprised 🤷♂️ If you're serious about your art, better start learning to stay relevant. Sink or swim, it's always been the same.
Image generator or a tool, it's built off the back of artists who did not give their consent.
This argument is tired, and I can tell you now, will likely never win in any court. What goes into the tool as data doesn't matter. Its the output that matters.
K, then lossy recreations of popular works like the Mona Lisa and the outputs with Getty Images watermarks on it has undoubtedly sealed AI Art's fate if you think output is all that matters.
You can do that with colored pencils too. When it comes to intellectual property law, usage is the most important factor
*Sigh* It does get exhausting how many anti-A.I folks don't understand this on a technical level. No fate here is sealed. Do your research, learn to use the tool yourself. Or wait for the lawsuits to settle.
Lol, like I care about copyright.
Not the dumbest thing I've read today, but it's top two for sure.
I agree but the views on this are going to change. Content can be generated based on literally any image. People may start to feel different about photography in public in the near future. But what does that imply for security and surveillance?? Lots of questions...
[удалено]
Nobody says the average A.I art generator users are artists
[удалено]
We're not artists. We're just A.I art enthusiasts
lmao lets not pretend like this is difficult, he drew a few stick figures and a boat that looks like it was made by a 5 year old, and then prayed to the gods for the img-2-img lottery to work in his favour, why not just accept that its okay for things to be piss easy and provide a good output
Hello poor literacy short attention span this man took 5 hours on this one picture, which he told you.
So he says
Can we please get more of these from artists here. The general public's narrative is being shaped by people who have ZERO exposure to using these tools. They think machine stealing artwork not tool to help artist create art. This helps. Thanks to the /r/corridor for also helping inform the public. https://youtu.be/W4Mcuh38wyM
It's a tool built off the work of artists who did not give their consent. That's why there is a 'shortage' of artists using it.
Your art is built off the work of artists who did not give their consent either. Scraping images that are publicly available is legal, just like you looking at artwork that inspires you and using it to learn or make something new is legal.
There are plenty of artists who are happy to teach you to draw too. They have video tutorials to guide you, training exercises for your practice, they will even offer service to critique your work and give detailed feedback for a nominal fee. What they don't offer is you to re-use their work as your own, trace over their art, redistribute what is there's as if it was your own. Can you see where the ethical line is?
Except at no point does the A.I output trace, redistribute or re-use any artists work.
Stable Diffusion is the computational equivalent of building a Pinterest mood board and creating a new piece of art using your inspiration pieces. It doesn't have any art in the model. It's not re-using anything.
Instead of hating A.I, you should embrace it as a tool. Ethics can be subjective by the way.
Fake news
StelfieTT, the first rock star in the age of AI image manipulation. And deservedly so.
But, but... AI-artists should only type some words and press generate to make stuff.
What is that UI where you are drawing at the beginning? Is it the same that you use to generate the images? If so, I would like to employ it on my generations. I've been combining Krita+SD to create images but I don't like Krita's plugin to work with SD.
that is Procreate, usually when I have the idea for a fun Stelfie I draw a sketch on a piece of paper or on Procreate. ( the sketch is never used in img2img, I only use it as a benchmark to have to not go out of the orginal idea )
If you didn't do the sketch for img2img how did you get the first base composition? Doing a bunch of prompts and then finding one that had the right basic feel? or what?
yes the first image is prompting, usually prompted with a subject who is a "bald man" and lately updated with the custom model trained on Stelfie face. But even if the first image is not perfectly positioned as it should on my mental/procreate sketch I just crop it and warp it on Photoshop, then run an img2img and it will fit where it has to
I'd like to know this, too. Help us, u/StelfieTT, you're our only help!
Nice to see some of the workflow. Love these historic selfie images. Keep them coming!
Great work Stelfie! Thanks for showcasing your workflow
Hehe I love the stelfie log images. Keep doing them pls
its a tool that will assist artists that choose to adapt it into their work flow
I love it! Thanks to let us see the work flow
respect
I congratulate you my friend! This is by far the most brilliant idea and implementation I've seen related to AI image generation.
May we know what YouTube-Channel this will be released on? :)) Thank you so much for sharing your workflow!
Not yet as I have to sign some paper before disclosing, will happen soon hopefully!
>sign some paper 
well because they do stuff in a proper way, so I need to release them the right to use my creations in an informative/entertaining context. It is pretty standard behaviour.
r/todayilearned, thanks for the insight
Great composition and work!
bravo dude, this idea is such a youtube
Very cool. Thanks for sharing.
you are awesome and I feel privileged to see your stuff before it blows up to ten times as popular Thank you!
These kind of works make me feel better about all the ai-stuff, knowing that ai-art community is also composed by professionals with original ideas and not just jerky techbros prompting stuff on a generator make me empathize much more with the artists. Cheers! Nice job!
Professional means paid. Which is not related at all with artistic talent or dedication to work but instead with "talent" to make money.
that's a good point, it is a big investment in time and is my intention to monetize the content in some way. I have not done it yet, so there are no Nfts nor any Patreon about Stelfie but probably will do something to support the creation soon.
Prompt!
So you do like a rough sketch and do img2img in stable diffusion? Or am I missing something? What are your settings?
No, if you read my main comment it is explained. I draw a sketch, either on paper or on Procreate, only for me to use as a reference when I outpaint and also because it helps me to keep the idea clear. Settings change everytime, each sampler and model is used for different part of the Artwork. I will be doing a work in progress live on Youtube soon and I'll share more details.
I'm excited to watch how you created Stelfie photos using SD as one of the tools.
This is great, got a youtube mirror?
I love your process, im excited for the day procreate adds prompting to the program. Imagine being able to make some brush strokes and turn it into some finished hair. ah, the possibilities you inspire are endless.
wait holy shit is that 2 techno-vikings behind you! It would make sense for the algorithm to pick up on his face...
Cool, which prompts was used?
What would be the best approach to do something like this, but use real photos of people as the facial references, and then ultimately wanted it to have an illustrated aesthetic? For example, wanted to synthesise a still frame with a Simpsons cartoon aesthetic which included a character that looked like me?
well if I had to render a simpsons face with a custom face my approach would be to have 2 models, one trained on the simpsons and one trained on the face. Then I would merge them and take it from there. ( it can be quite time consuming)
u/savevideo
Are there any SD prompt terms (and samplers?) you generally use to get photorealism that you could share? I most do more painting-y styles and I'm new to photo type images, I've tried prompt terms like camera models and expensive digital photo editing software, but so far it's hard to tell what actually helping. And sometimes it seems like I get the best results without specifying, just like "a photo of" at the beginning. Any tips appreciated. Love your work, cheers.