Magnific's photorealistic image generator: Useful for historical illustrations?

by Mary Harrsch © 2024

Watched a video about an AI graphic generator tool called Magnific. Unlike the early version of Generative AI I have used in Photoshop that limited your prompt to five words or less, Magnific allows you to describe the image you want in far more detail. Here are some of the images I was able to produce. First, I asked for a Roman centurion with a gladius battling a Germanic warrior with a battle ax and got the first image. Since the centurion's helmet did not have a transverse crest, the gladius was depicted as a dagger and I didn't think Germanic warriors used crested helmets, I replaced the word gladius to "short sword", specified a helmet with a transverse crest then described the Germanic warrior as wearing furs and a horned helmet, then got the second image. The centurion's helmet was still wrong so I changed the prompt to just say a Roman officer but increased the "creativity" setting from 33% to 60% and got the third image.

I took the first image and had to use Photoshop to remove armor for the right leg of the Roman that was in the wrong place but other than historical accuracy, it made an interesting image. The second image had the Germanic warrior's left hand holding what looked like a samurai sword hilt. I used Photoshop to remove it and refashioned his hand to look like a fist instead to make it a usable image. I've never seen a Germanic helmet that looked like the one depicted in the third image (It reminded me of the helmets from "Gladiator") but, oh well! I did notice the background image changed to resemble and arena rather than a battlefield, too. I wanted to have the Roman officer clean-shaven but I ran out of credits since I was using only the free version of Magnific (a 10 image limit per day). So now, I have to wait a day for my account to reset!

This tool could be quite useful for generating book covers or illustrations if you could craft the prompt enough to restore as much historical accuracy as possible. If you wish to create more images than 10 per day, a subscription for the software costs $39/mo to make around 200 normal upscales and 100 large ones.

https://magnific.ai/editor/

Magnific Roman fighting Germanic Warrior right leg armor removed (in the wrong place) Creativity index set to 33 

Magnific Roman with short sword fighting Germanic Warrior with horned helmet and rebuilt fist creativity index set to 33

Magnific Roman with short sword fighting Germanic Warrior with battle ax creativity index set to 60.  Notice how the background image has changed to an arena instead of a battlefield.