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(Semi & photo realism, with an eye to the artful).

v1 -(best for simi-realism, creative composition)

v2 -(very constant outputs with little fuss, High photorealism, detailed skin texture)

v3 -(Best retention of character, composition, & pose info from Illustrious, High versatility, with some patience, it's the most capable)

These models can use both Illustrious and XL Loras, though you may need to adjust the weights a bit.

I used a face detailer in about 10 of the 20 example images, and most use upscaling (4x-nickelback). A face detailer is generally helpful depending on zoom level, If your subjects face is about 30% or more of the image it can be detrimental. I urge experimentation in all areas.

V3 - Canny Mountain - (greater focus on retention of the illustrious knowledge base, camera film and post-processing effects)

Suggested settings:

• VAE: sdxl_vae (baked in)

• Clip skip: 2 was used during merge, (setting 1 or 2 should yield same results)

• Samplers: DPM++ 2M SDE, DPM++ 3M SDE, Euler Ancestral Schedulers: SGM Uniform, Karras, Occasionally I use others for variance. (experimentation is recommended),

• Resolution: all standard 1MP resolutions work well in portrait and landscape, (depending on context) (I often use 1024x1360 and 1120x1440 in portrait and landscape) I sometimes go as high as 1344x1728,

• CFG: 3.8 - 8.0 (I typically use 3.8, -5.6 for photorealism)

• Steps: 32 - 38 (I use 36 most often),

Prompting:

• Danbooru tags, & natural language prompting. Generally less is more, for best results try to write clear concise prompts, (look to my sample images for examples and general formatting).

positive prompts - responds well to camera related tags: photorealistic, raw photo, amiture photo, depth of field, bokeh etc.

• negative prompts - I generally recommend keeping sepia in your negatives to overcome a sepia bias. (it can be helpful to add a few things like "artificial, anime, illustration, unreal", if you're pushing for greater realism).

V2 - Fully REALized - (greater photorealism while maintaining much of the illustrious knowledge base)

Suggested settings:

• VAE: sdxl_vae (baked in)

• Clip skip: 2 was used during merge, (setting 1 or 2 should yield same results)

• Sampler: DPM++ 2M SDE - SGM Uniform, (good option for photorealism) or Euler Ancestral - SGM Uniform (experimentation is recommended),

• Resolution: all standard 1MP resolutions work well in portrait and landscape, (depending on context) (I often use 1024x1360 and 1120x1440 in portrait and landscape)

• CFG: 2.8 - 9.0 (I commonly use 3.8, 5 & 7)

• Steps: 24 - 38 (I use 36 most often, though I'm starting to use lower values with solutions like CFG rescale & Zero Star).

V1 - Beyond the Valley

Suggested settings:

• VAE: sdxl_vae (baked in)

• Clip skip: 2 was used during merge, (setting 1 or 2 should yield same results)

• Sampler: Euler Ancestral - SGM Uniform (most consistent good results), DPM++ 2M SDE - SGM Uniform, (good option for photorealism)

• Resolution: all standard 1MP resolutions work well in portrait and landscape, (depending on context) (I often use 1024x1360 and 1120x1440 in portrait and landscape)

• CFG: 2.8 - 8.0 (lower for more photorealism - I commonly use 2.8, 3.8, 5 & 7)

• Steps: 24 - 38 (I use 36 most often)

Prompting:

• Primarily Danbooru tags, mixed with a bit of natural language prompting. Generally less is more, for best results try to write clear concise prompts, (look to my sample images for examples and general formatting).

positive prompts - Hype4realistic can be added to push realism a bit further.

• negative prompts - I generally recommend starting with none and adding tags as needed. (it can be helpful to add a few things like "toon, illustration, unreal", if you're pushing for greater realism).

I started this project to in an attempt to recreated a specific aesthetic created by blinkdotleh using his workflow where 2 models split the steps during image generation. He created a series of images using Uncanny valley for the initial steps & my fabled Illusion model as a refiner. I created a style Lora from those outputs and included it in this merge. This is an attempt to recreate that look in a singe model while preserving as much of the Illustrious knowledge base as possible.

on the image generation side, this is roughly 50% Illustrious & 50% XL (mostly bigASP), while the CLIP more heavily favors Illustrious at about 65%.

Resources used / Creator thanks

Checkpoints:

iLustMix by GZees

BigASP v2.0 by nutbutter

Uncanny valley by meden - (clip only)

IterComp by Advokat

Fabled Illusion by self

RealVisXL V5.0 by SG_161222

Loras:

Hyperrealistic [Pony | Illustrious] by Zoropaton

SPO-SDXL_4k-p_10ep_LoRA_webui by rockeycoss

custom style Lora - (not yet publicly available)

(Additionally, thanks to everyone whos prompts I've pilfered for testing).