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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   29627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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I haven't investigated the AI art options too closely yet, but it seems to me that it would be really useful if I could sketch out a composition and have the AI make it look good. Does this capability not exist yet?

I think you're referring to a style transfer, which could produce remarkably impressive results even five years ago.

Fundamentally, this has existed for about 2 years, though the software to make it easy to do is more recent. I haven't used Photoshop, but I believe it essentially does that with Firefly, and for free tools, the Krita (freeware) extension to use Stable Diffusion does this pretty well. However, actually getting a "good looking" picture out of it is still something that's not likely to be a one-step process, but rather requiring iterations and intentional inpainting.

What you're talking about is a version of what's referred to as IMG2IMG, which is exactly what it sounds like, and, in fact, it's actually the same thing as TXT2IMG, just, instead of starting with random noise in the case of the latter, you're starting with an image that you sketched. Early on, keeping the structure of the original image was a major struggle, but something like 1.5 years ago, a tech referred to as "ControlNet" was developed, which allowed the image generation to be guided by further constraints beyond just the text prompt and settings. Many different versions of ControlNet exist, including edge detection, line-art, depth map, normal map, and human pose, among others. In each, those particular details from the original image can be used to constrain the generation so that objects you might draw in the foreground don't blend in to the background, or so that the person you drew in a certain pose comes out as a human in the exact same pose. It's possible to run multiple of these at the same time.

Again, in practice, these aren't going to be one-step solutions, with various issues and weaknesses that need manual work or further iterations to make look actually like a good work of art. But in terms of turning, say, a crude mess of blobs into something that looks somewhat realistically or professionally rendered while following the same composition, it's quite doable.

Yes, it's called in-painting, and Stable Diffusion even has a sketch mode that will turn stick figures into paintings.

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