A Regular Saturday
Saturday, January 10th, 2026 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio34F out there this evening, but we were up near 60F over the work week.
The first normal work/school week of 2025 has come and gone, and I haven't touched my headphones, or opened a DAW since last Saturday. And I think I may go one more week before playing it again.
MLK Day is MON 19, which means next weekend is a three-day weekend. So that should give me a nice window to hear the RR through the iLouds, and take notes... compare to the headphones... compare both to commercial mixes, etc... in order to calibrate my brain for the next phase.
But last Sunday (Gregoribrek D5) was not wasted. I got started on the artwork for the songs.
A good Hi-res image, perfectly square, for each song, is a must for release on platforms like BandCamp, SoundCloud, and even YouTube. 4000 X 4000 pixels is the standard, but 6K X 6K is even better.
So, I went back to good old NightCafe, the AI image generator I used back in 2023 to work up images for the 40+ songs of the older four albums... to re-package them in advance of this new album.
NightCafe used to have a nice, stock Anime model that generated great cartoon images for general purpose use... not too niche looking. And neither too photo-realistic, nor too sketchy.
Perfect for my music!.. and the anime style is very flexible, and pretty universal.
Unfortunately, they no longer have that model, and now the only anime models they have are extremely niche looking and will only render highly stylized images with hyped drama.
So Sunday night I was kinda floundering, testing other models to see if I could recapture that look I was after, but I was also struggling to come up with ideas for what those images should even be.
By Monday night, however I'd gotten down to business. I parted with $80.00 for a ton of new credits (having used up my old credits on Sunday's experiments).
And then I started a thread with DeepSeek to workshop ideas, and have it work up prompts, which I then handed to NightCafe's Z-Image Pro engine to generate.
I'd take note of any issues and we'd tweak the prompts and try again.
What we came up with was a core prompt that would get Z-Image to reliably generate everything in the same 1940s pulp comic, drawing style!
The idea there being; Archeology, evolks Indiana Jones, and the war-era pulps that inspired it.
We did have to fight, and make concessions to get what we wanted... a reel of tape, rather than a cassette, for example, and all the male & female figures dressed in those war-era clothes, with those period hair styles.
The final 12 images were great, but... after sleeping on it... by Tuesday night, I wanted to try a second route, just for fun.
That night we got Z-image to produce gorgeous images of "artifacts." 3D-looking, stone-carved, chipped and aged artifcts to represent the 12 songs. These were all done in a truly ancient, often egyptian style.
An ancient looking umbrella carved of stone, standing on a stone base, for Never Rains. A charming cricket amulet, carved in Jade, for Bed in the Suburbs, etc.
These were truly stunning artifacts and it felt like you could reach out and touch them!.. but after sleeping on it... by Wednesday night, I felt that the pulp images were too distant from the time period (the 1990s), and the stone artifacts, while gorgeous, were too cold.
So Wednesday's experiment was to try watercolor! I figured we could generate those 12 pulp scenes in more modern terms, but with watercolor, to show that they were distant memories, tinged with emotion.
A nice idea, and DeepSeek agreed!.. but Z-Image was not having it!
To Z-Image, watercolor meant it had to be super serious, and old-timey victorian! If we tried to force it to modernize something, or depict a person expressing a whimsical emotion, it would revert to photo-realism through a cheep watercolor filter, which looked terrible!
We gave up on both Z-Image, and watercolor, and after some further experimentation, found that Google's Imagen 4.0 Fast, was very good at generating graphic-novel style cartoon images! And it was also very flexible and cooperative!
So, with Imagen, we worked up a new core prompt to establish the look and feel we wanted to reproduce over our 12 images, and got seven of them done!.. all of side one!
Thursday night, we continued with Imagen and got the final five images hashed out.
And I'll say here, that it's never as simple as coming up with a good prompt and plugging it in. There are always unforeseen composition issues to re-think, and quirks of the model to compensate for... which is why it helped so much to have DeepSeek's AI acting as the translator.
I could work through things with DeepSeek in extremely plain language, for an extended period to create a solid new prompt that made a meaningful difference, when I finally spent the credits to generate the next image.
Last night it was just me and NightCafe, and I spent a good 90 minutes just deleting all the garbage takes that had been generated over the past week.
I kept the good pulp images, and the good artifact images, for possible use in future YouTube song videos, but I deleted all the watercolor failures, and all but the best of the graphic novel images.
I copy pasted the 12 winning prompts, from the DeepSeek thread, into a plain text file, and then I got to work with trying to get better results for some problematic scenes... just tweaking the prompts myself, a few words at a time.
Imagen had done a good job on WED/THU, but there was still room for improvement.
These test images all render at 1040 pixels squared, so they're too low resolution for publication. So, the winning images must be "upscaled" to 6000 pixel masters, which takes credits to do.
Thus, it's in my best interest to get the best possible versions, before upscaling.
So, by the end of last night, I had 9 of 12 images upscaled. The final three which continue to bedevil me are, Reavis, Tuesday Siren, and Closer To You.
I have very good versions of these three, but there always seems to be some little issue in each one.
So, tonight's mission is to get those final three upscales.
If and when I do, I'll have 6K masters of my album artwork, though!.. and that's not bad for a week's work!
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