I did an inpainting project for a client a few years ago. They were trying to inpaint banner ads for concert promoters, and find a way to make it easy to produce a bunch of different sized ads for a variety of placements. I was tasked with inpainting Xmas themed ad for a few major singers.

The weirdest thing was when the inpainting tool added strange people to an image. This singer was all decked out in tinsel and red, and the inpainting model added a grumpy old man in a top hat. I don't recall clicking the "Add creepy old man" button.

At the time this was Stable Diffusion on the backend, run by a variety of model hosting services, Amazon being one. They all had different requirements for the input image and that made things really complex. For some the aspect ratio was impossible to meet, and it would fail if the banner was 200x60. For others, you had to resize it before input, which meant you were adding an image with poor resolution to start. Garbage in, garbage out.

All of this to say, there is a lot of preproduction that went into it, and the client never ended up using my attempts.

This singer was all decked out in tinsel and red, and the inpainting model added a grumpy old man in a top hat. I don't recall clicking the "Add creepy old man" button.

Obvious reference to the Dickens story A Christmas Carol. In the UK there's a bylaw that requires Christmassy events to hire a Scrooge-like figure to lurk in the background so people keep their enthusiasm in check.

> At the time this was Stable Diffusion on the backend

The community made models (merges, fine tunes, etc) of that era are all completely overtrained and optimized for portraits and frontal shots. They would try to make a person out of anything. Inpainting faces is already a chore, even with a lot of tooling around that, but inpainting anything else is almost impossible. These models are also especially bad to fit objects naturally into scenes. You can make a crappy necklace or belt work, but introducing a new object into a scene just fails with infinite variety.

They are also much better using 512x512 as resolution, any larger deviation introduces more problems.

Considering you wanted to inpaint banner ads, they would probably get distorted heavily. Those models can't deal with fonts and are bad at a pixel perfect transfers. The only viable way to do this, at that time, would be to manually insert the banner ads and fix the seams with AI. Requires some artistic skill of course.

Your attempt was bold, but with the expectation of just supplying two images and let the models do it, it was impossible.

> For others, you had to resize it before input, which meant you were adding an image with poor resolution to start.

Thats because small models like SD (Stable Diffusion) are trained on very specific resolutions, its the fancier models that are trained on higher quality, or more diverse sets of resolutions, and if you use a higher quality model to generate lower resolution images, what's actually happening is you're trimming a much bigger image and getting a chunk of it output, at least that's how it feels based on my many hours of experimenting. If I use major models and try to center a thing, I never see it in the center. :) My GPU can only handle so much.