Just a couple months ago, I wrote about my latest experiments in using AI to draw liontaurs. I've been playing with different tools, especially Photoshop's Generative AI and Night Cafe, and I'm very pleased with the increase in quality after just a bit more practice.
I've upgraded to the Pro level in Night Cafe and created and trained a better model. The first model I made was still not up to government grade. Faces were especially poorly rendered, and that ruined those images, even if they were light years better than what I had made a year previously. But with this new model, the results are actually decent enough to stand up to general use. Let me show you my latest:
Let me not give the impressions that creating liontaurs like these is a simple task -- it is not exactly easy to get the AI to make fantastical creatures, especially hexapods! I would guess that for each of the images above, there are 10 to 20 bad images that were part of the prompt-writing process. But the faces here are actually nice, a step forward from what I was doing two months ago, and I have no complaints.
The Night Cafe site encourages engagement, like a social medium, with gamification and contests. I've enjoyed making images for some of these, wemics and other stuff. (Check out my best ones here.) The site ran a Mothers Day contest, and I wanted to make a liontaur mom and child. My effort, after a lot of trial and error, was still execrable. See. But I persevered. I used Night Cafe's Creative Upscaler tool. I took it into Photoshop and tweaked it with the program's generative AI options, plus old school retouching. Then back to Night Cafe and another couple goes at the Upscaler. Finally, round two in Photoshop, combining parts from other generations. And we get this:
Click to embiggen in a new tab or window!
Like I was saying, sometimes Night Cafe has contests, like for May the Fourth and Presidents Day. Here are two goofs I made for those:
