Chris Hannah


Turning DALL-E images into photos

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After playing with DALL-E recently, I wondered if I could use it to create wallpapers. I still haven’t totally succeeded yet, but I did think of an interesting image pipeline.

  1. Start with an image description.
  2. Pass that into DALL-E and choose an image.
  3. Run it through Pixelmator Pro’s ML Super Resolution.
  4. Treat it like a photo and do any usual edits/crops.
  5. Voila.

Here’s what each step looks like on one of my recent generations. (Note: all images have been scaled down to a maximum size of 1024px x 1024px).

The image description:

“a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour”

(Yep, handing should be hanging, I’ll blame autocorrect for that).

Here is the outputted image:

DALL E 2022 08 23 22 30 09  a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour

This is it after running it through the ML Super Resolution a few times. (And then resampling down to 1024px):

DALL E 2022 08 23 22 30 09  a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour  super res

After some edits:

DALL E 2022 08 23 22 30 09  a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour  super res  edited

Finally, cropped to a vertical 3:4 ratio:

DALL E 2022 08 23 22 30 09  a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour  super res  edited  crop

I think I’ll play around with the process a bit. But I do find it very interesting, and fun, to see how far you can take DALL-E images. The next thing I want to figure out is to make the images look like real photos, not like weird pieces of art.