I wanted to create a more emotional image with Stable Diffusion Webui and thought of a sad girl sitting at the edge of a dock, with her feet hanging down and a sad expression. Usually it’s hard to get Stable Diffusion to compose both the scene and a figure together in a very specific way. I wanted the girl to be at the end of the dock, but with the camera looking from the lake towards the dock so her face could be seen. I wanted a decent amount of lake to be visible and ideally a cozy cottage thrown in there too, for context. After a bunch of generations I landed on a scene that checked those boxes – a peaceful idyllic setting. The prompt was: A old wooden dock by a lake with a cottage in the background, summer, scenic, 8k, 4k, masterpiece, intricate
There were some things I didn’t like about this: I needed the dock to end so that the girl could sit there, and it looks like grossy algae in the bottom left (probably supposed to be reflection of the trees). So I used GIMP to make edits and then used Stable Diffusion’s img2img to regenerate based on my edit.
Now that the scene is set I added in a rough drawing of a person sitting at the edge of the dock. I also added back some green reflection to the water in the bottom left and cleaned up the top of one post, using GIMP.
Then I used Stable Diffusion’s inpainting to turn the rough drawing into a proper person. This took a number of generations. It’s a balance of the “Denoising strength” setting – how much the section you select for inpainting is converted to random colours. Set “Denoising strength” too low and the result will still look pretty similar – a rough drawing. Set it too high and the results vary wildly and the background can be start to diverge from the rest of the scene. This can be helped if the drawing were more detailed but I was lazy. 🙂 Sometimes I’ll use a low “Denoise strength” and keep feeding in the best results to incrementally nudge it in the right direction. I found a good result (and also fixed the water a little).
Time to upscale so that I could work on adding detail to specific elements. The cottage needed help after upscaling, with the railing and blocks of cyan by the railing. I merged together a couple upscaled versions, using GIMP, and turned the cyan in to a towel drying (’cause that’s what you do at the cottage!).
The girl’s face and hands needed help. I inpainted her entirely to help improve detail, and then inpainted her hands a bunch of times to fix them up.
Finally I inpainted her face to get the expression I wanted – looking upwards with her eyebrows raised in the middle. It took quite a number of generation to achieve what I was looking for. Here’s the prompt I used: A (sad:1.3) girl looking up, heartache, anguish, summer, scenic, 8k, 4k, masterpiece, intricate
