Tips and Tricks

Just starting out? Check out this series of videos from creator soundmagus!

Part of the reason we started this wiki was to keep track of the collective knowledge gained through experimentation. Eventually this page will act as a table of contents for more specific topics, but in the meantime tips will be organized by headers. Tips have been combined and condensed for clarity; tip authors are credited at the bottom of the page by their Discord handle. If you have a tip, feel free to add it!

**Tips are mostly about NightCafe (NC), but may be relevant to other models/services as well.**

## Crafting Effective Prompts

Use any words/scenes/colors/adjectives that you like. Build a little list full of words/artists/aesthetics you love. Totally helps to go back to when you’re stumped for ideas.

Think of the AI as a bright but extremely literal art student: try to describe as accurately as possible what you want it to make. (Although song lyrics, poems, and non-literal text can create some interesting results!)

Look up synonyms for certain words you like to use in prompts. For instance, the word “porcelain” is often used as a fancy decorative print modifier, and adding the synonyms of that word such as “Majolica” and “faience” can help express that word artistically.

### Using Multiple Prompts (With or Without Multiple Weights)

*(Much of this section was contributed by creator weresl0th)* In general, **if you separate your prompts** you can have additional flexibility in telling NC how "much" you want the featured attributes of that modifier to be present in the final creation, because you can adjust the weight. Weights are compared against each other and NC tries to balance the result accordingly. (Weight amounts don't need to equal 1; a prompt with a weight of .5 will be emphasized "half as much" as a prompt of 1.)

But if you have separate prompts and leave the weights *all* as one there may not be any difference, or in fact it could be worse sometimes in coherent.

If you're working with a prompt which is abstract or easy to misinterpret, and also trying to keep features distinct from each other, **try to reinforce what you want by repeating it but reworded in multiple prompts of equal weight.** For example,

* A burning hand holding a blood moon - weight: 1
* A blood moon being held by a burning hand - weight: 1
* burning hand - weight: 1
* blood moon - weight: 1

If a prompt results in some elements you *don't* want (like parts of faces), you can try putting those elements in a prompt field with a weight of -1.

**Another example:**

* Regarding having two subjects doing different things, coherent may be better than artistic.
* Describe them narratively. "two elves in the forest. one of the elves is casting a spell. the other elf is wielding a sword"
* also, reinforce in multiple prompts the subjects and what they're doing: "one elf casting a spell" "another elf holding a sword"
* You could also try adding a start image with multiple people in it.

If you want to see the impact a prompt has without losing it, you can turn it down to zero for the next iteration.

**Multi-prompt creations often work better with a start image** (especially highly detailed or patterned ones).

User ai-5 says: "[in coherent mode], **fiddling with individual prompt weights and re-running has usually gotten me very little improvement.**..I've found it better to hit "try multiple" on random seed and try to find results that way. Much more dramatic results than prompt weight fiddling. I've generally started running everything on [a weight of] 1. Lends to (often) crisper results. Sometimes I set the subject lower than the artist names...artist names are almost always a 1 though."

#### Example:

The following Discord exchange comes from tdraw\_ai\_art helping creator Cicero workshop their goal of creating a threatening atmosphere full of invading bugs.

**Original prompt is as follows (all weights at 1)**

* 1: Flying bugs in the air scared impressionism
* 2: Bugs are flying in the air creepy world
* 3: Creepy bugs are flying in the air Monet surrealism
* 4: Surrealism dark sky 8k lens Monet

**TDraw's advice:**

* I would consolidate the prompts mentioning bugs into the first field and keep the weight at 1
* take impressionism and surrealism and put them in separate prompts
* take surrealism down a bit and impressionism down more than that.
* Monet isn't a particularly threatening artist - so replace that with "by Shawn Coss", Junji Ito, or Cryptcrawler.
* Throw in some words on a lower weight like "gloomy, scary, atmospheric, dramatic" etc
* It could also help to give it a location: indoors? In a forest? Are you only looking to the sky?
* Another thing you can do is get more specific with the type of bugs. A ladybird and a mosquito are quite different flying bugs, with one being much more creepy than the other. You could even say "alien bugs" to make it more creepy by being totally unrecognisable.

### Using Coherent (CLIP-Guided Diffusion) Mode

Creator weresl0th suggests the following for getting good results with coherent mode:

* **break the prompt into multiple prompts based on the following premise:**
* set the narrative subject at the highest weight
* reinforce the subject at a slightly lower weight with variation in the wording
* art styles, separated and with lower weights than the primary subject so it knew to apply these, not create in addition to the primary subject

### Using Artists as Modifiers

Find an artist or medium that best meets your personal style and use them as your modifiers, especially if you have a specific result in mind. If you don't know an artist, Google things like "famous storybook illustrators" or "famous concept artists" before picking one that suits your needs. I include famous in that search so there's more chance the AI will already be familiar with them. Even if the artist isn't named in the drop down, the AI probably knows about the artist's style.

**Important note:** Let's say you use an artist like Alphonse Mucha. He did all those great art nouveau posters. Well, the thing about his work is that they almost all have some sort of portrait as well. So if you add him as a modifier, and have it close to 1 in weight, along with that cool art nouveau style you'll also end up with weird parts of peoples faces. With a subject (artist or anything, really) that is less trained you may only get a very specific "version" of that represented in your creation, or even something unexpected because the AI assumed something else matched better contextually.

You may get more coherent images if the art styles are all lower weights than the subject matter: one theory is that NC tries to interpret like weights equally, so instead of "painting/drawing" in that style it actually begins to create features based on what the models have for those modifiers.

### Generating "Normal-Looking" People

* Use start images when possible (if it makes sense) that relate as far as shapes/positions in the image.
* If you have a close up picture of a face, you may see better results if you reinforce that you want a face. Avoid visible teeth or hair that falls over the face.
* Multiple prompts with "face" "human face" may work.
* Check the progress pictures. An earlier iteration may still be interesting and more coherent.
* In coherent mode, you can try ‘(person) as (archetype/character)’. For example, "Audrey Plaza as a Wicked Vampire," etc.

**Some thoughts from creator Teecie74 on creating Klimt-style portraits of women:**

There are a lot of ways to make faces on night cafe but to make realistic faces, you need to have a starting image. It can be of anyone, but full face shots are best (not profile), you don't want too much hair in the face, and you don't want teeth showing, if possible, bc the ai doesn't know what to do with teeth. Hats and stuff tend to come out really cool, so they are not a problem.  Face shots by themselves tend to come out much better than full body shots, although I have had some luck with full body shots at times.

You can do the face in artistic first, then go and evolve it with coherent, keeping everything else the same,  to get more detailed images, or just go straight to coherent, which comes out more polished. If you use a picture of an African American woman, or an Indian woman, it will still come out as a white woman unless you put African American woman or Indian woman in the main prompt.

But if you put Klimt in the prompt, here's what I do: I put my instruction regarding how I want the woman to look in the first prompt. Then I put Klimt on the next line all by himself and I just use "Klimt". If you use Gustav Klimt, it will sometimes put a man in there. So you don't need "Klimt style" or anything. Just "Klimt", then go down to another prompt for your modifiers (8k resolution, beautiful, etc). All that does is add a certain style to the images, swirls and whatnot.

If you go straight to polished, you don't get much style. If you want the more stylized version, do artistic first, ONLY one coin, the 200 iterations in thumbnail. Then when you do it again, one more run with coherent, it often makes it so polished that you don't need to enhance it at all.

### Using Start Images

Think of start images as super detailed prompts.  They will convey **color, blocking and influence the features** in ways that are either controllable or possibly unexpected (in a good or bad way)!

As you've probably figured out, the AI doesn't look at your start image and necessarily understands all the features.  In general to use start images and get intended features where they're within the picture, **you need to reinforce the subjects with one or more text prompts.**

Finally, if you want to "remove" features you're seeing come up, you can try a negative weight.

**Creating detail and texture with your start image:** Sections that are uniform in color without any texture or detail will often result in the same in the final creation. You can avoid this if you have the time, tools, and patience by applying similar shades in the area and using some sort of blur/blend/distort tool or brush over it. [In this example,] the start image appears to be the moon surrounded by a dark sky. The sky is not uniform, and was touched up how I described above.

### Refining the Output Appearance

* "cel-shaded" (0.1 or 0.2) at a low weight can help to clean up image artifacts.

## Evolving Your Image

* Change the seed between evolutions, or the AI will continue to focus on the same area to the point where it loses definition. If you only change the seed by a few digits, the next image won't be too far removed from the last one.
* If you don't use a start image, it generally works better to use a text prompt with artistic and evolve the resulting image with coherent.
* You can go back and forth between artistic and coherent until you are happy with the output.

## Resolution and Runtime Settings

* In coherent: if you only want to turn up \*one\* setting for better quality without spending too many credits, make it resolution. Low resolution at short runtime can do quite well for a cheap creation!
* Increasing resolution with artistic doesn't tend be as impactful as with coherent.
* if you intend to have a larger, more detailed work, you will want to spend credits on run time (# of iterations) and the Output resolution, rather than enlarging a smaller image.

## Odds and Ends

### Image Post-Processing

Depending on your level of tech savvy or willingness to learn there will be a whole bunch of decent free YouTube tutorials on learning software like blender(free), Maya, 3ds max, unreal engine, etc.

If you have a picture and you just want to add some effects there are loads of free online programs or apps for editing GIFs by adding moving wave effects, fades from one to the other and so on.

### NC Videos

* Higher FPS increases the perceived speed of the video. 10-12 FPS is usually plenty.

## Contributors

* weresl0th
* Pussreboots
* tdraw\_ai\_art
* weresl0th
* Loucifer the Phoenix
* NightCafe\_Divinecassai
* artistsjourney
* NightCafe\_Angus (NightCafe Founder)
* Gold
* Cicero
* teecie74