Hi, I’m Zeng, the writer of PicAisso & WhoWhatWhyAi newsletter and a curious explorer of the AI world. I started PicAisso newsletter recently sharing everything in the world of AI Art. In this post, I want to share with you my experience with NightCafe Studio, an amazing AI image generator, and community that I stumbled upon last September.
What is NightCafe Studio?
NightCafe Studio is an online platform that lets you create beautiful artwork in seconds with the help of artificial intelligence. You can choose from different algorithms, such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, CLIP-Guided Diffusion, VQGAN+CLIP, and Neural Style Transfer, to generate images based on your text prompts or input images. You can also join a vibrant AI art community where millions of people create, share, and discuss AI art every month on Discord or right in their app.
There are 41 presets in NightCafe Studio. You can see the details in the image below. When I first started playing with AI art, there were around 20 presets. My favorites are SDXL Striking, Hyperreal, Abstract Curves, Epic Origami, Neo-Impressionist, Cosmic, Fantasy, and Heavenly. And, of course, the NightCafe preset! It just makes everything look amazing. You can find more about NightCage Studio here.
How I Found NightCafe Studio
I was browsing Twitter one day when I saw a tweet that caught my eye. It was a picture of a retro gas station on Mars, created by NightCafe Studio. I was intrigued by the surreal and colorful image, so I clicked on the link to check out the website.
I was amazed by what I saw. There were hundreds of stunning AI generated artworks on the homepage, each with a different style and theme. Some were realistic, some were abstract, some were funny, and some were scary. I was hooked.
How I Started Creating AI Art
I decided to give it a try and create my own AI art. I signed up for a free account and clicked on the “Create” button. I was presented with a simple interface where I could enter a text prompt or upload an image. I typed in “a purple dreamy galaxy” and chose the “cosmic” style. Then I clicked on “Create” and waited for a few seconds.
The result blew me away. It was a gorgeous galaxy image. It looked like something out of a fantasy movie. I couldn’t believe that it was generated by an AI from just a few words.
I was hooked. I wanted to create more. I experimented with different prompts and styles, such as “a unicorn”, “a castle”, “a robot”, “an apple”, etc. Each time, I was surprised and delighted by the results. Some of them were so good that I wanted to print them out and hang them on my wall. I made a few images for my desktop wallpaper and cover images for Notion. I made 100 of them, put them on Gumroad, and let people download them for free. You can get them here.
How I Joined the AI Art Community
I soon discovered that NightCafe Studio was not just an AI image generator, but also a social platform where you can share your creations and interact with other users. There were several features that made it fun and engaging:
- Chat rooms: You can start or join a chat room with your friends or strangers, and collaborate, jam or simply hang out while being creative.
- Challenges: You can enter or vote on official daily AI art challenges, where you have to create an artwork based on a given prompt or theme. Thousands of people participate and compete for the top spots every day.
- Explore: You can browse through millions of AI artworks created by other users, and like, comment or follow them. You can also discover new algorithms, styles and prompts to inspire your own creations.
I started to share my AI art on Twitter after I found out that I am able to earn credit with it. This is how I discovered a very helpful and lovely AI art community on Twitter. I met lots of amazing AI artists on Twitter.
If you are interested in AI art or just looking for something fun and creative to do online, I highly recommend you to check out NightCafe Studio. You won’t regret it.
You can find me on NightCafe Studio, or follow me on Twitter @zeng_wt. I also write a weekly newsletter called WhoWhatWhyAi, where I share the latest news and insights on AI. And an AI art newsletter — PicAisso. You can subscribe here.
Thank you for reading, and happy creating!