Making book covers with Stable Diffusion

I made a short video explaining how to use Stable Diffusion to create ebook and print covers

I used Krita to edit the photos but pretty much any image editor would do, you just need to be able to make selections and erase.

Here are the steps -

Step One

Go to https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion

or https://stablediffusionweb.com/#demo

and enter a prompt for the image you want.

For this tutorial, I wanted a space scene so used the following prompts to create four separate images that I would edit together.

"Lunar lander in space realistic"

"Astronaut tabletop miniatures realistic"

"Star field with galaxy realistic" (this gave me two images with prints hanging in a gallery, so maybe try different words)

"Realistic lunar base with stars in background"

Use the guidance scale at the bottom (if available) to tweak the settings.

I normally try to keep it between one and nine but experiment and see what you come up with.

After anything between 30 seconds and a minute, you should get your generated pictures.

If you don't get anything you like, keep trying!

Add more keywords and move the guidance scale until you get something you are happy with.

When you are done just right click or hold the image to download it.

It gave me four separate images, an Astronaut, a Spacecraft, a Lunar Base and a Starfield.

So now let's edit them.

Step Two

Lets take the Astronaut as an example.

I used the "Magic Wand" to select a contiguous colour to erase large sections by clicking on a part of the image that is a different colour to the Astronaut. You can then hold the shift key and click to add to the selection. If you then click "Cut" from the Edit menu, it will remove everything you have selected.

I then chose the Brush (in Krita) and changed its attribute to Erase and simply clicked and dragged over the remaining parts of the image I didn't want. I would use small strokes and release the mouse / pen regularly otherwise if you make a mistake and Undo, it will put everything back!

Use the zoom and change the size of the tooltip to erase fine areas.

You should now have a relatively clean picture of an Astronaut surrounded by a grid denoting transparency.

Save the file through the "Export" menu as a PNG file. This will preserve the transparency.

I then repeated the process with the Spacecraft and Lunar Base pictures.

The Starfield would be the background so depending on the look you want you could resize the image to fit the size of your book cover (this would stretch it) or resize the canvas which will create empty space around your picture. I resized vertically which left me with a blank space beneath which was fine as my Lunar Base would be going there.

Step Three

Now we need to create a single image

I opened the background photo (Starfield) and then in the layers menu chose to "Import as paint layer".

This opened a dialog which allowed me to import the Lunar Base image which appeared in a new layer on top of the Starfield. Then using the "Layer - Transform" tools I could resize if necessary and use the Move tool to place it where it would work best. Sometimes flipping the image horizontally can make the whole piece fit together.

I repeated the process with the Spacecraft and Astronaut, moving and resizing as required.

Finally I used the paint tool to draw a faint rocket exhaust and the text tool to put the author and book name.

Export the final image as a jpeg and you are done.

The final image will be small so you may need to resize it to make it bigger which means you will lose some quality. Using a paid service like Dreamstudio or DallE will allow you to create bigger images.

Congratulations, you now have a cover to use in a print book or ebook.