AI artwork for story covers

I’m new to Lush and have been writing on another platform for years.

What is the best program for creating cover art? Please forgive me if this is the wrong place to ask and I welcome your redirection. Again, I’m a rookie.

This is a good question that I've been asking too. Although I pull imagery from "public" sites to make my cover images, for all sorts of reasons I'd like to get away from using the faces of actual human individuals. I don't mind spending a little money for such a service, but some of the monthly fees are steep for how much I'd actually use it. And I have a strong aversion to anything that charges "tokens," which seems to me an attempt to avoid cost transparency.

Some have suggested Nightcafe. Haven't checked it out yet, but probably will soon.

Just signed up for Nightcafe, from which I get the first twenty images free. On literally my second prompt, it generated a good image for my forthcoming Competition story cover.

T&Cs say you may not use it to generate "pornographic" imagery, though of course they don't define what that means ... is female toplessness (which is allowed in Lush covers) okay, or does that go too far? Of course I'd like to generate explicit images too.

There's no 'best' as such because the various services constantly evolve to make more off the back of this commercial AI wave. I used to favour sexy.ai, for example, but now they not only watermark images (and charge for removal), they require sign-up and/or tokens/payment to do anything half decent.

Once you have an actual image, creating the cover is easy in the Lush cover designer tool. Or you can use your own offline program like Photoshop or (my preferred) Affinity Photo. Or an online service like Canva with a canvas set to the recommended dimensions of Lush cover art (currently 768x1200px).

[post moved from the AI generated stories thread]

Quote by Seeker4
Nightcafe

Trawling their Community Guidelines I can't figure out if every image you create (or prompt you use) goes through some sort of filter that will immediately be flagged to the Automoderator or a human moderator, or if every image automatically goes into the public domain after creation. Or can you make your own private gallery of Lush-style covers and download them, without sharing them with the community or being clobbered by the NSFW rules?

Almost all the current crop of online image generators require a monthly plan or token purchase. :ikejoe71 above, I don't wish to do either for the same reasons: because I don't use the tools often enough to warrant a monthly outlay, and the tokens concept is unworkable. I might go through ten or twenty iterations of a prompt to get exactly what I want and the first bunch of things it creates are garbage or have prawn fingers or whatever, so it's a waste.

I'd be interested in a tool (and a suitable non-pro engine) that allows me to dip in every so often, write a prompt to create an NSFW style Lush cover image, download it for use, and not care about sharing it with the Nightcafe (or any other) community.

Is that possible?

Often I use Google Image search in the very vain hope to find an image to represent my story. I admit, some of those for my In Heat series were from an AI website, but this was not deliberate. I do not understand AI, technology is not my forte. I am an artist, but the pictures were very convincing, but I did not create them. They served a need.

I have seen images that really move me to write thousands of words. I have never seen an AI image that can do that. I am more than happy to be wrong, but not yet.

Would I create one? No. I understand composition, lighting, positioning and arrangement. Colour, shade, shadow, there are a thousand words to describe a split second decision of an artist. AI is a mimic and not a very good one. Does it work for something banal like an image for a story here? Yes, of course. Would you hang it in a gallery to be appraised. No.

This is AI generated and I adore it, because there is not an artist or photographer that scratches this itch for me. Maybe that is the future, highly personalised pornography, and I would love it if she sat on my face! 😜

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

I'd be interested in a tool (and a suitable non-pro engine) that allows me to dip in every so often, write a prompt to create an NSFW style Lush cover image, download it for use, and not care about sharing it with the Nightcafe (or any other) community.

Is that possible?

I see that I never answered this. Yes. None of my cover images are currently shared on Nightcafe. Admittedly, only one is labelled NSFW by their standards.

They are picky. You can do nudes. You can do kissing. You can't do nude people kissing. But even here, I don't tend to do NSFW covers, at least not ones that are extremely so.

In general, I am with Amusebouche. AI image generation is a nice tool for something like Lush cover images, but hardly great art.

I normally try and grab photos that are about right on the web. I've used PerChance a few times. They do nudes, people in the know say it's not as good, but when you want tits out or something along those lines it's an option.

NiteCafe is supposed to be one of the best and a user here who does a lot of AI work uses it. No nudity so you have to have a non-nude idea in mind for the cover.

I use Krea.Ai...IT really is hit and miss, but you can get some decent Title Images as long as you don't overcomplicate it...

I used to use pictures taken from Tumblr, but I think someday someone is not going to like that. I don't like using AI for various reasons. I was using a fairly decent site for quite a while, but then it just quit for some reason. I don't want to pay for a site because I'm cheap. So I use Pretty AI Art Generator. It's free and far from perfect, but if you use the right words, you can achieve what you want in terms of an image. Sometimes it's taken me an hour to get exactly what I want.

Jay

I wrote a story about a woman who is imprisoned after a coup, and get abused in prison. It was too extreme, for example they shave her entire body as a way to break her, so it was rejected. I made this picture for the cover. If I can't publish my story, I can at least publish the cover. It makes me feel a little better!