More SF cover gals
But first, an Amazon shipping change!
Two items ordered on Wednesday, promised for Friday. On Friday, one of them was moved to Saturday. So far, pretty typical. On Saturday, its status changed to “approval needed”, and I was asked if it was okay for it to be delivered Monday. If I didn’t answer, and it didn’t arrive by the following Friday, I would automatically get a refund. The end result is the same, but the new messaging makes it seem like you’re involved in the process.
On with the cheesecake!
I liked the styling I was getting from Klein, so I tried some new LLM-enhanced dynamic prompts, shooting for the feel of a good-looking gal on the cover of a paperback where the author’s name isn’t well-known enough to make the sale. The initial batch had them in lingerie, because that’s where I got the horned horny covergal from the previous post, but I decided to see if Klein did as well at the “retro-SF uniform” look as ZIT did the last time I tried it.
Art styles were pulled from Juan’s Very Large List, grepping for the word “epic” and deleting a few artists where that was a false positive. I used the prompt-enhancing system prompt recommended by Z-Image Turbo to flesh out the random locations, plus two of my own targeted system prompts to generate clothing and physical details, plus a final LLM pass to do general cleanup. This would have been agonizingly slow on the Mac, so I ran it on the gaming PC in between image-generation runs (because SwarmUI and LM Studio both think they have the GPU to themselves, trying to run them at the same time blows out the VRAM, even though they should fit).
My system prompts were:
fashion: “You are a fashion consultant trained to design coordinated ensembles based on brief input, enhancing them into detailed, aesthetically pleasing, color-coordinated, and stylish looks. You refuse to use metaphor or emotional language, or to explain the purpose, use, or inspiration of your creations. You refuse to put labels or text on clothing unless they are present in double quotes (””) in the input. Your final description must be objective, concrete, and no longer than 50 words that list only elements of the ensemble. Output only the final, modified prompt, as a single flowing paragraph; do not output anything else. Answer only in English.”
makeover: “You are a fashion consultant trained to examine descriptions of human faces, bodies, clothing, and makeup in AI prompts, and add additional physical details that flatter the subject’s beauty, style, and aesthetics. You will not modify anything in the prompt that is not a physical description of the human subject’s face, body, hair, clothing, or makeup. You refuse to use metaphor or emotional language, or to explain the purpose, use, or inspiration of your additions. You refuse to put labels or text on clothing unless they are present in double quotes (””) in the input. Output only the final, modified prompt, as a single flowing paragraph; do not output anything else. Answer only in English.”
cleanup_text: You are a Prompt Quality Assurance Engineer. Your task is to examine every detail of an image-generation prompt and make as few changes as possible to resolve inconsistencies in style, setting, clothing, posing, facial expression, anatomy, and objects present in the scene. Ensure that each human figure has exactly two arms and two legs; resolve contradictions in the way that best suits the overall image. Remove all quoted text used for signs, labels, and captions. Output only the final, modified prompt, as a single flowing paragraph with correct punctuation; do not output anything else. Answer only in English.”
The new cleanup prompt includes an attempt to eliminate gratuitous text labels, but the image-generation parser often decides to add text based on random words in the prompt, so it’s not 100%. I didn’t want to use my usual collection of retro-SF costume prompts, so I fed the following to the fashion sysprompt:
“Sexy science-fiction uniform for women, incorporating bright colors, advanced technology, and a variety of futuristic textures and materials. Uniform may include abstract symbols and attached technology, but no text. Avoid shoulderpads. Do not use black or silver as the primary colors. You may include accessories such as sci-fi weapons, scanners, datapads, crystals, or glowing energy.”
Halfway through, I added the “bright colors” and the negative
instructions, because nearly every outfit ended up in black-and-silver
with armored shoulderpads. Sigh. This was all with the
gemma-3-12b-it-heretic-x-i1 model, and now that Gemma 4 has been
released, I’m going to see if it does a better job; it’s getting good
reviews, and I think there’s already a few uncensored versions.
Out of ~600 images, just under 13% had obvious anatomy fails, with most of them being extra arms or legs. There were some I rejected reluctantly, because the rest of the image was really good. They might be fixable with variation seeds, but I’ve kinda gotten out of the habit of doing that; it’s easy to spend more time tinkering than it’s worth, and you can always just make another batch.
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