As some of you may have seen, my next album in line to be released is “Ballet music for little kids: Dancing in the Clouds”. It’s going to be a collection of short piano pieces for kids that want to blast something from mommy’s bluetooth speaker and make the living room their stage, or to be used by teachers in ballet lessons for the very tiniest of dancers.
When it comes to album design cover, I’ve always photographed them myself, and finished off the design in photoshop. But this time, I thought I’d try something a little different using artificial intelligence (AI).
Our new robot friends
I’m sure a lot of you have had some encounters with our new robot friends that are popping up all over the online world. Their newest skill that seems to be very popular is the text to image AI. There’s a myriad of them out there, and they all have their distinct styles. The one that seemed to fit my needs the best (of the free ones at least) was the one called Dall-E mini. You know like in Salvador…Dall-E. There is a non-mini version, that you have to sign up for and wait in a queue to be let in. It can take quite a while. But this one is completely free for anyone to instantly play around with!
For those who’ve never seen these image-AIs, what you do is you describe in a text box what you want to see, you press enter, and out comes a few different versions of what you described! It’s really quite amazing, and well worth a try.
Creepy cats
Anyway, since I had a very specific goal with my image, it wasn’t too hard coming up with so-called prompts to try out. At first I thought, maybe the kids would like some dancing cats. Kids like cats, right? So I input album cover displaying a kitten dancing ballet in a tutu which gave me the following results:
Less creepy cats
As you can see, it absolutely produced nine album covers displaying a kitten dancing ballet in a tutu. No question about that. Also, no question, some of them are a little bit creepy… So I thought, if I specify in the prompt that this is supposed to be for kids, maybe it gets a little bit less creepy. So I went for album cover for ballet music for kids displaying a cat dancing ballet. That gave me these 9 covers:
Not bad! It’s clearly more for kids. You can tell that the AI has learned that if you say ballet, it often draws tutus. Makes sense I guess.
More general prompts
Alright, so that’s the cat route. It did give me what I asked for, but alas! no cover-material yet. Although I have to say, the cat in the middle with notes in his whiskers is pretty adorable…
So that was a pretty specific request. Now, what happens if you’re a lot less specific and try something like album cover for ballet music?
A more childish direction
These are some pretty nice looking album covers, pretty dark and serious looking, and I think it’s very clear that mr. Dall-E has a pretty good grasp of ballet. Though he does seem to think that you ballerinas have extra limbs sometimes… So let’s push this towards more childish imagery again with album cover ballet music for kids:
OK, now we’re back to the cheerful side of things again, and this is way closer to what I had in mind.
Iterations
I tried repeating the prompt, to get another iteration of the same. Remember, that these are created by the AI from the prompt, so they’re not searched out from the internet. You will never get the same images twice from these AI artists. Look at the next batch of images from the same prompt:
These are all pretty good, and it got me my first possible candidate for the cover, with the top middle one.
A few more iterations later, I ended up with an image I liked for a cover:
Upscaling and editing
Since this Dall-E mini is a free and unlimited service, what you give up is resolution. The images come out in pretty low resolution. This means that if you want to display it in a larger format, it’s not going to look great. You’re going to start seeing pixels and noise. Since I have access to Photoshop, I used their upscaling feature, which is pretty good. There are some pretty good free online upscalers as well that you can use in the same way. My music distributor wants album covers that are 3000×3000 pixels, but for most uses, that is unnecessarily large, in my opinion. As a reference, your HD TV probably has a resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels.
After enlarging it, I added a frame, the title, my name, and some small details, and here’s what I ended up with…
Tell me what you think about my pick. Would you have chosen another one? Have you ever tried one of these AI-artists? Comment away!
