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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3833 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 19, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It's not bad, but could be better. Since you're asking for critique:

  • The title font seems like an odd choice. a quick search of sci-fi book covers shows a lot of examples of sans-serif, generally trending toward punctuated angularity. While one can always buck the trend, it's good to do so for a solid reason. The sort of psuedo-cursive you've got reminds me of a neon sign or something, which seems a weird choice for a hard sci-fi story.

  • The title positioning is likewise odd. tilted at an angle, cutting over the window frame, and the second line doesn't contrast well with the lower edge of the window frame. people do the boring stuff because it works.

  • Colors are not great. Overall, the colors come out as almost black and white, due to the floor, walls, rockets and the kid. The colors you do have are soft, sorta pastel, and a bit muddy. This combines with the title white and green to make the color scheme just sorta messy.

  • the lighting is wonky. the walls are brightly lit, the floor seems to be too, but the kid is very dark. The light he does get isn't very directional, so it's not even a silhouette or a rim-light, so it looks rather broken.

  • the composition is very stable, very static, all straight up-and-down lines, no real action or motion. the window frame and the way it's presented flat to the camera, the kid's posture, and the rockets all contribute to this. compare:

angle of the clouds, road, and the rockets in this shot

perspective on the smoke and clouds implying motion here

same here, with the smoke and buildings

...Are you generating the background, and then photoshopping the foreground? If so, there's some simple photoshop tricks that can get you better results. Any details you can give on your process?

Definitely going to give the story a try, looks pretty interesting!

The image is pretty much entirely AI generated, any PS work was limited to fixing some obvious congenital deformities in the silhouetted kid, and removing annoying watermarks.

Are those images AI generated themselves? I could do with a better prompt, this is one I thought up waaay back when SD was in alpha, and eventually found a variant that worked for the purposes I was going for.

As for the overall style, I wanted it to be idiosyncratic, something that stood out in a field of works that think throwing a spaceship in front of a nebula is good enough!

I appreciate the comments on the typography, at the moment I'm locked into the current version, but it's something to consider for the future!

Are those images AI generated themselves? I could do with a better prompt, this is one I thought up waaay back when SD was in alpha, and eventually found a variant that worked for the purposes I was going for.

I got the images by searching Pinterest for "rocket launch". Have you tried the generate-from-sketch options? Seems like it'd be easier to composite together an image, and then have the AI chew it over to unify the style... I really need to play with SD more.

I've dabbled with Controlnet and img2img, but it can be a PITA at times.

Bing has one benefit of having a better encoder, it understands subtle nuance in prompts and semantics better, though you tradeoff stylistic flexibility.

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