I was really struggling to come up with a cover pic for my latest story I posted above. I wanted an empty bottle of vodka lying in the foreground, and a couple in their underwear on the bed, blurred in the background, her sitting astride him.
That's very specific, and a Google search of course came up with nothing I could use, so I figured I'd try to split my search efforts and manually composite the elements. Hunted for "sensual woman on top" type images and found a few that didn't match but were possibilities, and downloaded them just in case. Then tried to find "empty vodka bottle on its side". Nope.
I turned to various AI tools for generating the full image. They almost all wanted me to buy credits to even see the first result and I wasn't risking cash when I doubted the results would even work out. Plus, any time I used "in their underwear" or "lightly clothed" or whatever, I got nsfw warnings, and the porny generators have nearly all gone to subscription models.
The most annoying part: not a single generator would render an empty bottle on its side. Not one. Even if I changed the prompt to only try to render an upturned bottle on a table. I got full bottles which were somehow full of liquid, even though the bottle was open and on its side. I got half empty bottles likewise. I even got weird bottles with a neck either end, still half full of clear liquid.
In frustration, I remembered seeker4 said Nightcafe was good so I signed my account up. Tried a prompt that wasn't too explicit at first, just asking for people in their underwear, her on top of him, and after a couple of tries got this:
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/fcgHg2ETdH4zFm4MDW4q?ru=KrsMwHyeCae0yqFR2Fa91I2E5do2
Fine whatever, the bottle isn't empty but at least it looked the part and was actually bottle shaped. And crucially there was a natural break where the bed starts. So I snagged the pic, put it in Affinity, erased the couple, hunted the web for a couple in their smalls and eventually found one. It was full colour, tonally different, wrong lighting, wrong size but if I zoomed the vodka bottle in a bit, I could sort of get away with pasting the image behind it to line the beds up and maintain the perspective.
Then I adjusted the tone for colour correction, gave up fixing the lighting and just hoped nobody would notice, set about blending the two images where the beds joined so it looked kind of like a seamless shot, then applied a subtle blur to give the illusion of depth, and added Gaussian noise to try and match the grain of the vodka bottle image.
Annoyingly that left no room for the text. I wanted it in the space above her but had to put it in the middle. That did help hide the ropey stitch job, so every cloud.
Anyway, the result worked out and I was happy with the effort. I've just logged into my and have 35 messages from Nightcafe congratulating me on achieving rewards and earning badges and reminding me to log in to create more and that people have commented on my work and that I should gift people stuff to earn more points and I need to buy Pro and....
Wtf?
I didn't even click any button to "publish" the work. I thought it would.be private until such time as I was happy with the result, but no, it had published my failed attempt too, and people had commented on them both. I eventually found out how to log in (it kept logging me in as Anonymous User from the email links, and then refused to let me log in with my actual account until I ditched the cookies and started again). Found the delete button to erase the WIP image.
And found the Notification prefs.
My goodness. If you think Facebook has a tonne of settings, try Nightcafe. Notify me when someone I don't know comments, notify me when someone sneezes within half a mile of my creations, ... it goes on and on and on.
Now I've turned all those off, it'll hopefully stop spamming me. But I still haven't found out how to create something from a prompt and NOT immediately publish it. Probably there's a tick box I missed when I clicked Create. But I'm in no hurry to use it again unless I absolutely have to, so that's a problem for future me.
To be fair, I'm impressed with the quality, and it's certainly better than most of the AI image creators out there (thanks for the tip-off, seeker) but I'm not sure it'll become a staple part of my cover-generating workflow.
