Hi Arch thanks for your response.
I actually find that negative prompting makes it worse, in keeping with the above principle that the more detail specified the less accurate the output is in terms of common sense, anatomy and so on. If I specify nothing negative, the results are mostly at least anatomically accurate, but if I specify that I don’t want multiple heads or tattoos, it is likely I will get these. For example the following prompt gets me some pretty good results, like the below (which is a painting still, but somewhat photographic, and I actually managed to get some real photographs before):
“A candid photograph of a pretty, middle class, 56 year old French woman who is slim with broad hips and graying hair that still has some of the original brown. She has prominent crow’s feet around her eyes and her skin accurately reflects her age all over. She is dressed with casual, artsy elegance, in a blouse, silk scarf, leather jacket, baggy cords, and with brown boots. She is standing at the bar of a cafe in Paris. Her hair is like a kaleidoscope of different colours, but has grayed considerably.”
Once I include the following negative prompt: “tattoos. writing. multiple pictures. bad anatomy. cartoons. anime. unrealistic skin. instagram-style filters. drawn images. a painting. purely gray hair. low quality hands. nudity.” - there is no real improvement, and if anything the quality is slightly lower, below representative, though at least they were all vaguely anatomically correct:
Once I add the instruction to include another person, all accuracy goes out the window:
“A candid photograph of a pretty, middle class, 56 year old French woman who is slim with broad hips and graying hair that still has some of the original brown. She has prominent crow’s feet around her eyes and her skin accurately reflects her age all over. She is dressed with casual, artsy elegance, in a blouse, silk scarf, leather jacket, baggy cords, and with brown boots. Her hair is like a kaleidoscope of different colors, but has grayed considerably. She is sitting discussing philosophy in a cafe in Paris with her 30 year old male lover. The lover is blond, clean-shaven and is wearing a tweed jacket, blue jeans and subtle sneakers.” (Same negative prompt as above)
Produces at best this:
But mostly garbage like this:
Is there a guide that discusses how best to use negative prompts? Or how to prompt at all. I am frustrated because I spent ages yesterday evening getting amazing, photographic results, and tonight it has all deteriorated. This leads me to suspect the servers are deliberately giving me bad results due to high traffic or some other reason that would depend on the time of day.
That is a very helpful post. One thing I don’t understand is the “seed” idea. I assumed this was so that you can get the same person over and over again? but I tried including the seed in a new iteration, just by including “(seed:::64482721)” and I got a completely new set of people. I did find more terse descriptions helped a lot, which is strange because some of the generators say use as much detail as you like, and the AI brain text generator thing also works on this principle. It is frustrating to me that I find a great granny (well, more middle-aged lol) and can’t generate her again in other settings, so info about seeds would help feed my weakness for elegant, cultured grannies!