What is fine-tuning and why is it important?

What is fine-tuning?

Fine-tuning teaches the AI Image Generation model to recognize and generate new concepts. This is done by training/showing it a small set of example images. This allows you to customize the model's output for specific styles, characters, or objects.

Why is fine-tuning important?

As a creative practitioner, you might find that AI images all have a similar look/aesthetic - they lack originality, and feel flat. Fine-tuning can be a great way to bring your own style or concepts to AI Image generation, without struggling with a lot of prompt engineering.

Here, the artist Archana Prasad, who also goes by arcnoid, shared her original sketches in black ink. Notice that the style of the drawings is specific, with long faces and noses, and the textures and colors are very sparse. The use of human figures is also created in a highly abstracted and minimalist style. We used 12-15 of her images and created a fine-tuned model called arcn0id.

Here you can see the difference between the image generated with Flux.1 (with no fine-tuning) and the one on the right, which is fine-tuned with arcn0id style.

See this example, where we used Mughal miniature paintings (sourced from Creative Commons) to generate our AI images in the style of Mughal Miniature Paintings.