I am going to instruct you on how you can create beautiful ai-generated or assisted images. We’ll be using the Stable Diffusion app for it. 

Nightcafe

The penniless version works only if you have a formidable enough computer, though – most importantly it needs to have an NVIDIA card. If you’re already filtered out by that and you’re not looking to upgrade your computer anytime soon, you still have the opportunity to use Stable Diffusion through Nightcafe website .

Nightcafe is it is where I made my first images as well, and it is a good enough platform to start learning. Nightcafe also can upscale your images should you generate something print-worthy! It comes with a free mode (you’ll get daily top-ups for points you need to generate the images with), but you can also buy a subscription if you like (starting with ~ 10 euros per month). Nightcafe is also brilliant because you can use it on your phone!

Bare Bones

So, if you have an NVIDIA card, the next step would be to get yourself graphics processing software. If you have Adobe Photoshop, might as well stick to that – if you don’t have it, there is an excellent open-source alternative for you, and I am using it as well – Krita – you can find the download link here.

If you don’t plan on retouching any of the images as precisely as these graphics processing programs allow you to, Stable Diffusion works perfectly fine in any internet browser as well. But you still need to install it on your computer to run it. 

Time to apply some brain:

First, get git and python installed, then pull this somewhere in your computer (e.g. desktop, documents, whatever)

Follow the installation guide on the AUTOMATIC1111 page, and get the necessary add-ons (checkpoint file) – I will not link here, since I can’t keep updating this page!
With this, you can use the diffuser in your browser (locally) – if you don’t want the option of editing with a brush on the go, stop here, but if you do…

For the Krita plug-in, you pull another git into the stable-diffusion-webui “extensions” folder:
https://github.com/Interpause/auto-sd-paint-ext.git

Follow the installation guide – and if stuff shows up saying “unable to retrieve” or whatever, in Krita’s stable diffusion panel go to the Config tab and hit “restore defaults” to fix it 🙂

Enjoy the toy!

Follow a selection of generated and retouched images in the spirit of Eysin and her comrades. 

Artwork: