I. Introduction
There has been a lot of talk in recent months about outlawing AI art. On the one hand, some argue that if AI is not permitted to be used to create art, the digital art space will become stagnant. Some argue that limiting or prohibiting its use would protect the artistic value of traditional forms of art and keep artists from losing money.
AI art generators, in my opinion, could be a useful tool for designers to supplement rather than replace their creative process. Designers can use AI to create more engaging visuals faster and at a lower cost. AI art generators can also provide artists with materials such as photos, fabrics, patterns, colour schemes, and typography. As a result, they can create unique designs without having to build them from scratch or gather resources from other sources.
Overall, I believe AI art generators have a great deal of potential in today’s digital space and should not be prohibited because they can add value and variety to the art world.
In this article, I will walk you through the daily workflow of creating a Valentine’s Day poster using four tools. At the same time, I’ll compare them based on the images they generated, efficiency, cost, ease of use, and so on to find the most useful one.
The TOP 4 AI Image Generators used by Designers
MidJourney
Midjourney is a popular AI art generator. Unlike other AI art generators, Midjourney’s art generation feature requires the use of a community app called Discord. But once inside, you’ll be surprised.
You are welcome to look at what others have created with it before submitting your own. Perhaps the numerous messages will inspire you. MidJourney is well-known for its high-quality artistic style painting, in addition to strong community bonding.
Unlike other tools, you can watch as the AI transforms your images from blurry colours to high-definition thumbnails. It’s almost hypnotic, making you want to eat even more.
Imgcreator.ai
In illustration, 3D design, and realistic photography, Imgcreator outperforms other AI art generators. Surprisingly, you can create visuals with both original images and text-based images. In addition to the traditional anime and painting styles, users can turn themselves or their friends into humorous memes, which is thought to bring more enjoyable experiences to the virtual world.
It is worth noting that imgcreator was the first to introduce the AI studio function. To create made-up visuals, AI studio employs generative artificial intelligence. It trains an AI model on actual images of a subject to learn how to create photos of that subject.
The subject could be a person, an animal, a thing, or even an artistic movement. Science and technology are represented by wiredGod Of War and other styles. Why not give it a shot if you want to change your look?
Most importantly, Imgcreator’s edit feature eliminates the need for users to recreate their work. Users can change images layer by layer and element by element with just words, which is extremely useful for designers like me.
As an example, you could upload suitable additional images, cut off the desired piece, and then add it to the image to improve its appeal. You can also simply delete the unsatisfactory portion and type your preference. You’ll have a better chance to improve your photo using the editor.
Users can use the basic features for free, and the advanced features would
DALL·E
DALL-E is an AI image generation model developed by OpenAI , the same company that created GPT-3, one of the best natural language processing models. Currently, OpenAI released the hotly anticipated DALL-E API in public beta, which means developers can now integrate DALL-E directly into their apps and products. “We’re really excited for all the ways that developers can take this technology and customize it for specific needs, specific applications and specific communities, to scale further than we ever could.”said from Luke Miller, product manager at OpenAI.
The biggest advantage of DALL-E is that it has a good understanding of prompt and a high accuracy. At the same time, it can be hard for an AI painting tool to create real pictures. But the pictures that DALL-E generated have clear angles, light and details that make them look more realistic.Just like Midjourney, you can also create ‘variations’ of any photos where you’d like to see some similar outputs.
Stable Diffusion
This AI generative art model has superior capabilities to the likes of DALL·E 2 and is also available as an open-source project. It means anyone can use it and the projects can build off it with few restrictions. When it comes to Stable Diffusion, professional users may come up with the function of adjusting parameters in the platform.
- Length and width measurements: it is not correct that “The better the effect, the bigger the value” . If you want a higher resolution image, you should first create it in SD and then find a perfect model to upscale that works.
- CFG scale: A higher value will make the generated result match the prompt better, and it will also make the resulting photo more saturated and contrasted, with smoother colors and less texture. However, above 20 there will be adverse effects.
- Steps: Each additional step will give AI more opportunities to compare the prompt with the current result and adjust the picture. Higher steps require more computation time and are relatively more expensive. But that doesn’t necessarily mean better results. Of course, an insufficient number of iterations (less than 50) will definitely degrade the resulting pictures quality.
- Number of pictures: How many photo results are generated for each time. Four is an ideal number, because the result of Stable Diffsuion is very random, and there may be both ideal and unsatisying results in the same batch of returned results. Of course, the more numbers you choose to generate, the longer the calculation time will cost, and you will need to spend one more credit for each additional credit.
- Sampler: The sampling mode of the diffusion denoising algorithm. The two with “_ancestral” may have different effects, and the results of “ddim” and “plms” will be very different.
- Seed: A random seed for generating each image, which is used as the basis for determining the initial state of diffusion. How to use seeds to create various possibilities has become the most interesting part of Stable Diffusion.
V. Idea Inspiration
For designers, inspiration is a life-giving oasis in the creative desert. Almost everything in this world has the potential to inspire you. You never know what will inspire your imagination, and I frequently discover that some of the most mundane things cause me to consider projects from fresh or new angles.
With these AI picture generators, I believe the fastest way that we can get inspiration is from their work in the platform. which is really helpful for idea inspiration. Midjourney has the specific community showcase on the index. However, the number of pictures that we can see is limited if we are not paid users. Never mind. Midjourney also has a community on Discord, where we can observe what other users are generating.
Community in Imgcreator.ai has no limit to the number of pictures. And all the pictures can be seen and divided by sort, which is more convenient for people who know what type of pictures they want to check. Users can give a ‘like’ to the work they really appreciate. In addition, you are allowed to try the same prompt.
Now, we should have a general demand for the design of Valentine’s Day posters. Let’s use the tools mentioned above to generate different objects for direct comparison of prompt accuracy and photo quality.
The output of the same prompt test in different tools:
Simple Prompt:
To begin, we feed the prompt ‘A poster of Valentine’s Day’ to all the tools.
Midjourney
Imgcreator.ai
Stable diffusion
DALL-E 2
Apart from Imgcreator, three AI art generators provide four pictures. Midjourney is good at artistic expression, and has the highest resolution. The details of the figure are perfect. While the atmosphere the picture represents is more like a movie poster. As for stable diffusion, the generated picture focuses on the whole picture. It uses many elements like a heart and flowers to present the scene. From the angle of prompt accuracy, DALL-E is the most similar one. The output photo only represents the words’Valentine’s Day’ . But for the poster, it is not enough. Finally, due to the setting in Imgcreator, I can choose the style ‘poster illustration’ to restrict the output. So certainly, what we get from Imgcreator is the overall shape and the outline of poster, which includes words, typesetting and several elements. The apparent flaw is lack of details.
Complicated Prompt：
I ran the same experiment as above, this time with a more complicated (positive) prompt. This time, rather than ‘A Valentine’s Day poster’ , I use “A Valentine’s Day poster, full of red, pink, and white, love and romance. The background may be a gradient of pink and red or a picture of hearts, roses or Cupid, love birds, candies, flowers, phrases like “Be Mine,” “Forever & Always,” “I love you,” or “Happy Valentine’s Day”.
Midjourney
Imgcreator.ai
Stable diffusion
DALL-E
This time, all tools present more details with complex promopts. While, only DALL-E and Midjourney create more elements than the other two. They separately generate Cupid and candies. But still exists the same problem: unable to create a picture like a poster. They just create some elements related to Valentine’s day.
V. Design Asset Preparation
A poster is composed of words, logos, and main painting. Once the workload is high, the file can be messy. For me, it is most convenient to find my history photo in DALL-E. The previous photos are listed the in right place.I can select the element at any time instead of open another page to check my history box. But most importantly, the abilities to create specific objects like words,logos, elements do really matter. Now, I will create the must material for poster with those tools.
Words
Midjourney
Imgcreator.ai
Stable Diffusion
DALL-E
Machines have difficulty with up-to-date changes in language such as slang words or newly coined phrases. AI’s lack of nuance and agility when it comes to recognizing words makes it significantly less useful than human brains when it comes to understanding text. I feed the prompt’ a poster with beautiful calligraphy ” Happy Valentine’s Day’ . As we can see from the result, Imgcreator.ai and DALL-E won. They can nearly identify the word and present it clearly. Surprisingly, the photo from Imgcreator has a little design instead of only words. Midjourney can provide us nice calligraphy, while its words cannot present well.
- Element
I pick up ‘Draw a set of whimsical, watercolor-style clip art images that feature hearts as postage stamps. The images should have a romantic, Valentine’s Day themed aesthetic, and should incorporate elements such as hearts as well as stamps that are decorated with hearts in a variety of different arrangements or patterns. The stamps should be depicted in a variety of different styles and sizes, and should be adorned with details such as texture, shading, or other realistic features. The overall mood of the images should be light and cheerful, with a focus on the joy and celebration of love and romance’ as prompt to feed each tool.
Midjourney
Imgcreator.ai
Stable Diffusion
DALL-E
In poster design, visual and intuitive picture components are essential and irreplaceable. A photo contains a tremendous amount of information when compared to text. Designers must incorporate a variety of information into one or more diagrams.
From my point of view, it is no doubt that output from MidJourney is most delicated and less watermark, which is often more aesthetically pleasing. It is essentially built to be “pretty by default”. So every element in the picture can be cutout and added to the poster. But in my opinion, the atmosphere of yellow seems a little bit vintage. Similarily, DALL-E provides more elements to be chosen.
V. Further Editing
Due to the randomness of AI painting, users may generate many times before encountering satisfactory work. If there are some small flaws in this picture, and the AI painting tool cannot edit it, all most users can do is regenerate it once until they encounter a nearly perfect photo. Among these tools, DALL-E and Imgcreator own edit function.
The basic function of editing is to erase the part you want to discard and describe again. Firstly, rub the part you are unsatisfying with. And then, fill in a new prompt like ‘flying birds’.
DALL-E will return four pictures and you can choose the one you think is perfect and meet your requirements.
What’s more, you can have the AI help you expand your image using the Generation frame tool.To see if it was as easy as explained I had to try it myself. To cut it short – it was easy, and the result was much better and quicker than I could have made myself in Photoshop. Although, I would have done some additional work in PS to make it even better.
First, choose ‘add generation frame F’, and fill your description in the blank, and generate. Once the extra picture is generated, you can select one from 4 options.
Finally , you will get a picture that has been generated over 4 times.
The original photo
The output
Aprt from these two basic functions, Imcreator upgraded their editing function, which is regarded as more powerful and intelligent.
- Layered Adjustment
In Imgcreator, each element you add can be regarded as one layer, which means you can modify them separately. You can even adjust the opacity、brightness、saturation and contrast to make it more natural. What’s more, you can
- One click remove background
In Imgcreator, you can totally edit a picture just like establishing a building——layer by layer, element by element. Don’t worry about uploading a picture with messy background. In imgcreator, you can remove its original background with just one click, no matter how complicated it is. And then, move these elements into the target place.
- Adding text
Machines have difficulty with up-to-date changes in language such as slang words or newly coined phrases. AI’s lack of nuance and agility when it comes to recognizing words makes it significantly less useful than human brains when it comes to understanding text. With imgcreator, you can type what you want to display and move it everywhere in the picture. Surely, you can choose a favorite font style for them.
V. Customized Model
It takes a lot of time to accumulate as a designer if you want to develop your own design style. The major factors are your individual interests and pastimes. To develop your own style, you must have a preference for a particular element of fashion and keep experimenting, learning about it, and enhancing it.
It is worth mentioning that imgcreator owns AI studio function, which is the first one to launch among AI art generator on the market. It uses actual photos of a subject to train an AI model and learn how to create photos of that subject. A person, an animal, a thing, or even your designing work could be the subject. Style includes science and technology、wired、God Of War and so on. Feed it with your work and train your own style.
VII. Future Outlook for Design landscape
While these experiments are certainly not rigorous or exhaustive, they provide some insight into the relative performance of Midjourney, Imgcreator.ai, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E. As for me, I will combine Midjourney with Imgcreator.ai to assist my design work. The reason could be tracked as follows:1、Community can access more photos, which maybe bring out more inspiration. 2、the ablities to create delicated picture is strong in Midjourney. 3、Imgcreator.ai can present words more sommthly. 4、Imgcreator support editing deeply, like changing background, outpainting, inpainting and adding text and modification layer by layer.
Of course, the above is just my personal opinion. You can definitely try one by one like me and choose the tool that suits you best. As people become more dependent on technology, the demand for top-notch AI art generators will only grow as technology develops and more individuals get interested in digital art. Additionally, improvements in AI and machine learning technology will make AI art generators more accessible to a wider range of users and make them easier to use.
I believe that one day, the most helpful and powerful AI art generator will eventually show up. It is no longer a beautiful picture generator. Instead, it will be equipped with all powerful functions and become the second best friend of human.
