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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I rendered batches of 20, and picked the output that I subjectively felt was most-aesthetically-pleasing.
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Prompts and other information to reproduce the images are included for each.
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.
