Dream with your Eyes Wide Open

Please enjoy PhotoSomnia, a general-purpose model merge blended and adjusted with an objective of emulating film photography, with some success.

Q. Isn't this just another model blend?

A. Short answer - No, this is the best photorealism model you'll find today.

Long answer - Yes, imo the people who are training/fine tuning and are sharing their models/embeddings/etc. are the real heroes of the AI art community! But this is an excellent photorealism blend for a few reasons - it's been the most responsive to prompts than any others I have tried, and seems biased towards producing photorealistic outputs. Also despite the incorporation of many nsfw models, it doesn't seem as biased towards producing NSFW outputs as many other photorealism blends, I consider this a positive.

Q. Isn't this just a rip-off of Analog Diffusion/Dreamlike Photoreal/any other model?

A. Though both of those models and many others have been involved in the blending process, it seems to produce relatively unique outputs thanks to the weird and chaotic blending workflow I've been using. The influence of certain models on Gravy Mix seemed quite clear, but this blend shouldn't be considered a direct derivative of any model other than Stable Diffusion 1.5.

Q. What models did you use?

A. Anything I could find that appears to be trained on actual photos of actual people, plus some artistic ones and top-quality photorealism merges. It's a big list appended to the end of this blurb, and I hate to admit it but I may have missed some, and also may not have used some on the list, but they're in my models folder and are quite likely to have been used.

Q. What ratios are they blended at?

Calculating the ratio of any contributing model would be impossible. My general approach since Gravy Mix has been to grab the latest photo-trained/fine-tuned model I can find and use the either the weighted sum/add difference merge at a low ratio with the Work in Progress model, reduce all the weightings across the board once things start to get a bit overdone, and continue the process with various models to steer things towards my idea of photorealism as best possible until I'm satisfied with the results I'm getting.

It's not as scientific as A+B ratio blends nor as controlled as block merging which I never found the time to experiment with. It's an open-ended exercise but I think the results are aesthetically pleasing enough at this stage for this model to be shared. I presume that AI-assisted blending tools running on more capable systems than my old mid-tier gaming laptop will soon make this sort of approach obsolete, especially with SDXL as a base.

Q. The outputs are blurry/weird/fake looking/suck :(

A. I'm ok with the softness and other quirks of the outputs. I've blended this model for myself and will share it with the community as it is, if they aren't useful for the style you are aiming for feel free to try using it for your own model blends to suit your own styles, or use this model for composition and img2img or controlnet with your preferred model to achieve the results you're after.

Q. What settings/prompts should I use?

A. Check the metadata of the demo pics for some examples.

Q. What licensing applies to this model?

A. It's my gift back to the community that has made so much possible for me. My understanding is that despite using other models to make PhotoSomnia, this is not a direct or provable derivative of any model other than Stable Diffusion 1.5, thus Open RAIL-M should apply. Whether or not the or not the publishers of the models listed below agree with the above licensing terms is between the user and them.

If your are using this model I would greatly appreciate attribution considering how much time and effort I've put into this, but it's not a requirement.

Q. Will there be updates?

A. The final version is final; While this is one of the best photorealism models available I'm no good at hyping it so it's slipped under the radar for most users.

Model Merge List (updated for latest version):

iirc these are trained/finetuned models that have been used at some stage of developing this blend:

Absolute Reality

Analog Diffusion

Bigger Girls Photorealism

Brits out for the lads

Cafe-Instagram

Doctor Diffusion

Dreamlike Photoreal v2

Emotion Puppeteer

Elysium_V1

El Zipang

Epic Realism

f222

Humans

Metagod Selfie Mix

NeverEndingDream

NextPhoto

Noise Offset for True Darkness in SD

Parailansfw

Project Photo Beta 2.0 LITE

QGO-10b

RPG v4

sldrRealism

StableGram

Subreddit V3

td-UltraReal

This Babe Doesn't Exist

This Is Real

Vodka

WoopWoop Photo 2.0Alpha

WavyFusion

Z_phyr Mix

Hassan's Blend (not actually used directly but so many of the other blends use it that it needs a mention)

...and of course the often forgotten but always fundamental Stable Diffusion 1.5.

afaik these are merged models only, all of which are wonderful for photorealism and/or other styles just as they are:

Analog Madness

Ares Mix

Art & Eros (aEros)

Deliberate v2

HARDblend

Hunter69 v1

I Can't Believe it's Not Photography

kkwIDEAL

MegaMerge v1.1

OpenDream 2.0

Perfection

PhotoMaxUltra v1

Protogen x34

Realistic Vision v1.4

Reliberate

s1dlxbrew

StablyDiffused's Magnum Opus

Sunshine Mix

TheAlly's Mix II: Churned

uber-realistic-porn-merge