DALL-E outpainting or how to have your mind blown in a few frames
This is truly jawdropping stuff
DALL-E now does outpainting.
Outpainting is a process in which the AI model extends an image beyond its current borders, and it is as impressive to watch unfold before your eyes as you might imagine.
This is my original picture, generated using Midjourney. Some people think that it’s dirty feeding an AI’s images into another AI, but I think it’s kinky. Yes, you read that right.
Outpainting is very easy to perform, and the results can range from hilariously bad to “I can’t believe that just happened” good, depending on how you go about it. But considering the fact that it gives you the power to place the Mona Lisa into a space station or have the dude (?) from The Scream scream in disbelief at the latest lowest-of-the-low discount, I’d say it’s worth devoting some time into learning how to do it well.
And how to “do it well” boils down to one simple concept: context.
The way this works is that you upload a picture and then place frames around it and describe what you want to see. The AI should then extend the picture beyond your original 1024 x 1024 image, inside the new frame.
Easy, right?
Not if you’re me, apparently. In hindsight, it makes a lot of sense, but you obviously have to have some overlap between the original frame and the new frame for the process to work correctly, otherwise you’ll get a totally unrelated new image.
This is what happened when I asked the AI to add a garden of petunias without any overlap between the original image and the new frame:
And here’s what happened when I asked the same, but with some overlap between the original image and the new frame:
The more context you give the AI, the better and more seamless the results you’ll get. So don’t be afraid to have significant overlap between the original image and the new frame (or a generated frame and any subsequent frames).
Here’s another example. I generated this one in Midjourney:
Let’s add a frame. First, I crop the image into a square (pretty easy, since it’s already a square. Very weird how an AI that can bring your grandma back from the dead cannot tell that the image is already square) and then select “Edit image”
Then, I click on the “add generation frame” icon and place the new frame in such a way that it overlaps almost half of the original frame:
That’s it. Now I can type anything in the prompt area, so I went with “add a dog flying on a jetpack” and select this out of the four alternatives DALL-E gives me. Not exactly what I had in mind, but you can see that the extended area retains the styling and artistic choices of the original picture.
Stay tuned for more outpainting experiments!
Check out my book “Create Stunning AI Art Using Craiyon, DALL-E and Midjourney” if you’re REALLY into this kind of stuff.
