A series of famous present-day landscapes in the US picked from this list rendered in the style of John William Casilear, a 19th-century American landscape painter. They don’t look quite like the actual locations – to do that, I expect that one would probably do better to start with a photograph and do img2img transforms – though they do get new, interesting landscapes with the feel of them.
Rendered in Stable Diffusion.
These are 2560x1440, aiming for a full-screen image on a 1440p screen, and are probably suitable for use as desktop backgrounds on such screens. If you are viewing these on a desktop in 16:9 aspect ratio (the most-common these days), you can probably benefit from opening the images and viewing them fullscreen. I include a link for each, as the lemmy Web UI doesn’t have a great way for a user to view an enlarged inline image (IIRC the kbin Web UI does).
Scotts Bluff, by John William Casilear
Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 12, Size: 1280x720, Model hash: ebf42d1fae, Model: realmixXL_v15, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 2, Hires steps: 10, Hires upscaler: Latent, Version: v1.7.0-133-gde03882d
Three Sisters Springs, by John William Casilear
Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 6, Size: 1280x720, Model hash: ebf42d1fae, Model: realmixXL_v15, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 2, Hires steps: 10, Hires upscaler: Latent, Version: v1.7.0-133-gde03882d
Kent Falls, by John William Casilear
Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 19, Size: 1280x720, Model hash: ebf42d1fae, Model: realmixXL_v15, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 2, Hires steps: 10, Hires upscaler: Latent, Version: v1.7.0-133-gde03882d
Avenue of the Giants, by John William Casilear
Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 18, Size: 1280x720, Model hash: ebf42d1fae, Model: realmixXL_v15, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 2, Hires steps: 10, Hires upscaler: Latent, Version: v1.7.0-133-gde03882d
Buffalo National River, by John William Casilear
Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 10, Size: 1280x720, Model hash: ebf42d1fae, Model: realmixXL_v15, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 2, Hires steps: 10, Hires upscaler: Latent, Version: v1.7.0-133-gde03882d
Denali, by John William Casilear
Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 15, Size: 1280x720, Model hash: ebf42d1fae, Model: realmixXL_v15, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 2, Hires steps: 10, Hires upscaler: Latent, Version: v1.7.0-133-gde03882d
Dismals Canyon, by John William Casilear
Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 13, Size: 1280x720, Model hash: ebf42d1fae, Model: realmixXL_v15, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 2, Hires steps: 10, Hires upscaler: Latent, Version: v1.7.0-133-gde03882d
Santa Elena Canyon, by John William Casilear
Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 2, Size: 1280x720, Model hash: ebf42d1fae, Model: realmixXL_v15, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 2, Hires steps: 10, Hires upscaler: Latent, Version: v1.7.0-133-gde03882d
-
I usually use the Euler a sampler; I find that the ancestral samplers (“-a”) tend to do better on things like fingers (though they have the technical drawback that adding more samples also alters the image; you can’t just “converge” on a single image and throw the minimum number of samples required at the problem). For at least these painted landscapes, I didn’t seem to have any visible issues using a non-ancestral sampler.
-
I tend to render at 1024x1024, the SDXL training resolution; this helps to avoid things like people with extra limbs. For landscapes, this doesn’t seem to be an issue for me, and using a different aspect ratio seems to work without flagrant visible issues. My experience is that it can lead to similar elements replicated in an image, but doesn’t seem to be a crippling issue for these landscapes.
-
One of the largest issues I ran into was reflections in water that didn’t quite match the image above the water; I tended to select images without reflections in the water, or at least ones where the issue was less-obvious, though having reflections in water is common in landscape paintings and in Casilear’s actual works. My impression is that Stable Diffusion can deal well with situations where a perfect mirror of an image is expected, but not with one that is distorted in various ways – as is the case for water with ripples.
-
I usually post images in PNG format. I use JPEG here; they are less than a tenth the size for images in this style, and I feel like doing PNG for the larger images I’m doing here places unreasonable load on the lemmy host I use, which is – at no charge – hosting posted images for users of the server. I wasn’t able to see any artifacts in visually-inspecting PNG and JPEG versions.
-
I rendered batches of 20, and picked the output that I subjectively felt was most-aesthetically-pleasing.
-
Prompts and other information to reproduce the images are included for each.
You must log in or register to comment.
Thank you for posting these beautiful landscapes and your thorough explanation!
I really enjoyed going through them, the “Avenue of Giants” being my favorite for the sheer scale it portrays.
