Refining the Valkyries

about 2 years ago

Today, I am going to continue my never ending quest to satisfy the appetite of my mind's eye. I'm changing from Greek Myth now to Norse, and what better way than to crate a piece (or perhaps pieces?) based on the Valkyries.

I'm going to be using MidJourney today, to see what I can get in comparison to the initial tests yesterday from Stable Diffusion.

I like both models, they're both useful for different things, and I feel as though for this one, I'm liking the coherence of what MidJourney is offering a little more than Stable Diffusion.

valkyries descending from the sky highly detailed cinematic headshot portrait color photograph, beautiful women, painted by the pre-raphaelites --ar 16:9

I want it to be more dramatic, like the poem from yesterday's post. Thunderstorms, lightning, drama. Only I forgot to add those words to the prompt. Whoops.

Here I go again...

winged angelic valkyries descending from the sky, surrounded by a thunderstorm, to a battlefield highly detailed cinematic headshot portrait color photograph, beautiful women, painted by the pre-raphaelites --ar 16:9

This time I remember to change the prompt, and I've got a few iterations before I realised I could imrpove the prompt even further, though the examples are still getting closer to what I want.

winged angelic valkyries descending from the sky, surrounded by a thunderstorm and lightning, wide angle, highly detailed cinematic headshot portrait color photograph, beautiful women, painted by the pre-raphaelites --ar 16:9

This appears to be the most magical prompt, I liked the result, so I produced tons and tons of iterations. There's a few that I will likely upscale, I'll need to look closely at each before deciding whether or not I want to create more iterations.

winged angelic nordic viking valkyries descending from the sky, surrounded by a thunderstorm and lightning, wide angle, highly detailed cinematic headshot portrait, dramatic lighting, backlighting, atmospheric, beautiful women, painted by the pre-raphaelites, millais, waterhouse --ar 16:9

There's two image out of that group of twenty that I really liked, and I'm currently enlarging them to see what the result will look like. Could they be the first two image in a sequences of portraits representing various Valkyries and their quest to lead the slain warriors to the halls of Valhalla?

I have no idea right now because as I type this, I'm waiting for MidJourney to hurry up and generate my images.

Here is the first one that caught my fancy. I love hthe fact that you can make out figures in the background. I'm going to see what happens with a "remaster" via MidJourney to make it more photographic; but it is very "broad strokes" in terms of its painterly style.

This second one that caught my attention, made the thumbnail look as though there were tombstones in the background. There were not, apaprently, so this image here will not be reproduced or worked on further at all.

Meanwhile, the "remaster" of the first image has come through, and well, it is completely different. I don't like it, safe to say. :D

So instead, I will be trying to do some other style of upscales instead, just to see what the results look like, and to see if they deviate too far from the original "upscaled" painting.

Well this is something completely different, using the same image - I don't understand. :D

It is very pretty, but its a departure from any of the other images it descended from.

So instead, I'm going to take the original one that I liked the most and upscale it using the most computationally demanding method I can using MidJourney to see what the result is. Worst case scenario, I will take it into Stable Diffusion and use img2img to see if I can extract more detail from it.

Turns out that the seeds generated by MidJourney are completely different from those used by Stable Diffusion, or at the very least, they yield very, very different results.