[ewjt]

Can you elaborate on “properly tweaked”? When I use one of the Stable Diffusion and AUTOMATIC1111 templates on runpod.io, the results are absolutely worthless.

This is using some of the popular prompts you can find on sites like prompthero that show amazing examples.

It’s been serious expectation vs. reality disappointment for me and so I just pay the MidJourney or DALL-E fees.

[kouteiheika]

> Can you elaborate on “properly tweaked”?

In a nutshell:

1. Use a good checkpoint. Vanilla stable diffusion is relatively bad. There are plenty of good ones on civitai. Here's mine: https://civitai.com/models/94176

2. Use a good negative prompt with good textual inversions. (e.g. "ng_deepnegative_v1_75t", "verybadimagenegative_v1.3", etc.; you can download those from civitai too) Even if you have a good checkpoint this is essential to get good results.

3. Use a better sampling method instead of the default one. (e.g. I like to use "DPM++ SDE Karras")

There are more tricks to get even better output (e.g. controlnet is amazing), but these are the basics.

[renewiltord]

Thank you. I assume there's some community somewhere where people discuss this stuff. Do you know where that is? Or did you just learn this from disparate sources?

[kouteiheika]

> I assume there's some community somewhere where people discuss this stuff. Do you know where that is? Or did you just learn this from disparate sources?

I learned this mostly by experimenting + browsing civitai and seeing what works + googling as I go + watching a few tutorials on YouTube (e.g. inpainting or controlnet can be tricky as there are a lot of options and it's not really obvious how/when to use them, so it's nice to actually watch someone else use them effectively).

I don't really have any particular place I could recommend to discuss this stuff, but I suppose /r/StableDiffusion/ on Reddit is decent.

[bavell]

Pretty good reddit community, lots of (N/SFW) models and content on CivitAI. Took me a weekend to get setup and generating images. I've been getting good results on my AMD 6750XT with A1111 (vladmandic's fork).

[Lerc]

What kind of(and how much) data did you use to train your checkpoint?

I'd like to have a go at making one myself targeted towards single objects (be it car,spaceship, dinner plate, apple, octopus, etc). Most checkpoints are very heavily leaning towards people and portraits.

[Auracle]

I’m not the OP but I’ve made some of my daughter, wife, dog, niece, etc.

People generally suggest 30+ images. I’ve found - at least with people - the more the better. My wife’s model is trained on ~80 images of her.

[orbital-decay]

Are you using txt2img with the vanilla model? SD's actual value is in the large array of higher-order input methods and tooling; as a tradeoff, it requires more knowledge. Similarly to 3D CGI, it's a highly technical area. You don't just enter the prompt with it.

You can finetune it on your own material, or choose one of the hundreds of public finetuned models. You can guide it in a precise manner with a sketch or by extracting a pose from a photo using controlnets or any other method. You can influence the colors. You can explicitly separate prompt parts so the tokens don't leak into each other. You can use it as a photobashing tool with a plugin to popular image editing software. Things like ComfyUI enable extremely complicated pipelines as well. etc etc etc

[nomand]

Is there a coherent resource (not a scattered 'just google it' series of guides from all over the place) that encapsulates some of the concepts and workflows you're describing? What would be the best learning site/resource for arriving at understanding how to integrate and manipulate SD with precision like that? Thanks

[rwiggins]

I have found http://stable-diffusion-art.com to be an absolutely invaluable (and coherent) resource. It's highly ranked on Google for most "how to do X with stable diffusion" style searches, too.

[kouteiheika]

> What would be the best learning site/resource for arriving at understanding how to integrate and manipulate SD with precision like that?

Honestly? Probably YouTube tutorials.

[TeMPOraL]

Jaysus.

I'm going to sound like an entitled whiny old guy shouting at clouds, but - what the hell; with all the knowledge being either locked and churned on Discord, or released in form of YouTube videos with no transcript and extremely low content density - how is anyone with a job supposed to keep up with this? Or is that a new form of gatekeeping - if you can't afford to burn a lot of time and attention as if in some kind of Proof of Work scheme, you're not allowed to play with the newest toys?

I mean, Discord I can sort of get - chit-chatting and shitposting is easier than writing articles or maintaining wikis, and it kind of grows organically from there. But YouTube? Surely making a video takes 10-100x the effort and cost, compared to writing an article with some screenshots, while also being 10x more costly to consume (in terms of wasted time and strained attention). How does that even work?

[bavell]

I've been playing with SD for a few months now and have only watched 20-30m of YT videos about it. There's only a few worth spending any time watching, and they're on specific workflows or techniques.

Best just to dive in if you're interested IMO. Otherwise you'll get lost in all the new jargon and ideas. Great place to start is the A1111 repo, lot of community resources available and batteries included.

[orbital-decay]

How does anyone keep up with anything? It's a visual thing. A lot of people are learning drawing, modeling, animation etc in the exact same way - by watching YouTube (a bit) and experimenting (a lot).

[TeMPOraL]

Picking images from generated sets is a visual thing. Tweaking ControlNet might be too (IDK, I've never got a chance to use it - partly because of what I'm whining about here). However, writing prompts, fine-tuning models, assembling pipelines, renting GPUs, figuring out which software to use for what, where to get the weights, etc. - none of this is visual. It's pretty much programming and devops.

I can't see how covering this on YouTube, instead of (vs. in addition to) writing text + some screenshots and diagrams, makes any kind of sense.

[sorenjan]

Take a moment and go scroll through the examples at civitai.com. Does most of them strike you as something by people with jobs? Most of them are pretty juvenile, with pretty women and various anime girls.

[sebzim4500]

Are you under the impression that people with jobs don't like pretty women and anime girls?

[dustypotato]

The difference being that youtube videos can make more money for the author. Anyway, it's all open source, so feel free to make a wiki

[TeMPOraL]

I would if I could keep up with the videos :).

[kouteiheika]

I mostly agree, but in this case it can be genuinely useful to actually see the process of someone using the tool effectively.

[bavell]

ComfyUI is a nice complement to A1111, the node-based editor is great for prototyping and saving workflows.

[famouswaffles]

You're not going to get even close to Midjourney or even Bing quality on SD without finetuning. It's that simple. When you do finetune, it will be restricted to that aesthetic and you won't get the same prompt understanding or adherence.

For all the promise of control and customization SD boasts, Midjourney beats it hands down in sheer quality. There's a reason like 99% of ai art comic creators stick to Midjourney despite the control handicap.

[orbital-decay]

Yet you are posting this in a thread where GP provided actual examples of the opposite. Look for another comment above/below, there are MJ-generated samples which are comparable but also less coherent than the result from a much smaller SD model. And in case of MJ hallucinations cannot be fixed. MJ is good but it isn't magic, it just provides quick results with little experience required; prompt understanding is still poor, and will stay poor until it's paired with a good LLM.

Neither of the existing models gives actually passable production-quality results, be it MJ or SD or whatever else. It will be quite some time until they get out of the uncanny valley.

> There's a reason like 99% of ai art comic creators stick to Midjourney

They aren't. MJ is mostly used by people without experience, think a journalist who needs a picture for an article. Which is great and it's what makes them good money.

As a matter of fact (I work with artists), for all the surface-visible hate AI art gets in the artist community, many actual artists are using it more and more to automate certain mundane parts of their job to save time, and this is not MJ or Dall-E.

[Miraste]

There's a distinction to be made here. Everything that makes SD a powerful tool is the result of being open source. The actual models are significantly worse than Midjourney. If an MJ level model had the tooling SD does it would produce far better results.

[bavell]

> If an MJ level model had the tooling SD does it would produce far better results

And vice versa, which is the exciting part to me - only a matter of time!

[whywhywhywhy]

Midjourney output all has the same look to it.

If you’re ok with basic aesthetics it’ll work but if you want something a bit less cringe or that will stand out in marketing it won’t cut it.

[Miraste]

It only has the same look if it's not given any style keywords. I've been impressed with the output diversity once it's told what to do. It can handle a wide range of art styles.

[whywhywhywhy]

Then we need to give style keywords to the other networks too, and suddenly the gap shortens.

Default Midjourney is one thing and that’s mid…

[famouswaffles]

>Yet you are posting this in a thread where GP provided actual examples of the opposite.

Opposite of what ? OP posts results from a tuned model.

[orbital-decay]

Opposite of this:

>For all the promise of control and customization SD boasts, Midjourney beats it hands down in sheer quality.

The results are comparable, but MJ in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409043 hallucinates more (look at the roofs in the second picture). And it cannot be fixed, maybe except for an upscale making it a bit more coherent. Until MJ obtains better tooling (which it might in the next iteration), it won't be as powerful. I'm not even starting on complex compositions, which it simply cannot do.

>OP posts results from a tuned model.

Yes, which is the first step you should do with SD, as it's a much smaller and less capable model.

[zirgs]

If course it's a tuned model. Why would anyone use stock SD these days?

[chankstein38]

I feel like people shouldn't talk in definitives if their message is just going to demonstrate they have no idea what they're talking about.

[famouswaffles]

I know what i'm talking about lol. I tuned a custom SD model that's downloaded thousands of times a month. I'm speaking from experience more than anything. Don't know why some SD users get so defensive.

[SV_BubbleTime]

You load a model and have 6 sliders instead of one… it’s not exactly “fine tuning”.

If you want the power, it’s there. But nearly bone stock SD in auto1111 is going to get to any of these examples easily.

Show me the civitai equivalent for MJ or Dalle2. It doesn’t exist.

[famouswaffles]

>You load a model and have 6 sliders instead of one… it’s not exactly “fine tuning”.

Ok...? Read what i wrote carefully. Your 6 sliders won't produce better images than midjourney for your prompt on the base SD model.

[zirgs]

Midjourney has a riduculously restrictive keyword filter. You should have mentioned that.

Also I see nothing wrong with using different models for different purposes.

[capybara_2020]

First off are you using a custom model or the default SD model? The default model is not the greatest. Have you tried controlnet?

But yes SD can be a bit of a pain to use. Think of it like this. SD = Linux, Midjourney = Windows/MacOS. SD is more powerful and user controllable but that also means it has a steeper learning curve.