Puzzle Together now lets you generate most any puzzle image you can imagine, in just seconds! All you need to do is write a short description of the image, and hit “Generate Puzzle.” It’s that easy!

This is made possible by cutting edge “deep learning” AI technology, specifically a system known as Stable Diffusion.

While you can often get very good results with very little effort, there are some useful tricks for writing successful prompts. (“prompt” is another word for the written description used to generate the image.) On this page you’ll learn some of the basics of generating great images, and you’ll find a bunch of examples as well as a list of resources where you can learn a lot more.

 

Prompt Writing Basics

At its simplest, to write a prompt, all you need to do is state the subject of your image. For example, here’s an image generated from the prompt “A magical wizard school library with a young witch studying”:

Note that the prompt included the setting (a magical wizard school library), the subject (a young witch) and an action (studying). Your prompts don’t need to include all of these; the AI will fill in whatever’s missing from its own ‘imagination’.

The AI cares about the order of the words you give it — put the elements you want to emphasize most toward the beginning of your prompt. In this case, by mentioning the library before the witch, the setting is emphasized.

If you include an action, keep it simple; the AI quickly gets confused by complicated actions. Likewise with your subject, the AI does much better when there is a single subject rather than multiple subjects.

So we’ve successfully generated an image of a young witch studying. But, it might not be in the style we want. The AI just chooses a style at random from the most common styles for this type of subject, unless we specify what style we’d like. How do we do that? The easiest way is by naming an artist (or more than one artist) whose styles we want the AI to draw inspiration from.

In the following example, I’ve used the same prompt but added “by Mary GrandPré, by Levi Pinfold” at the end. These are artists known for their work on the Harry Potter book series.

By specifying the artists, the AI has created a similar image but incorporating some elements from those art styles. The character is older, and it now uses a painterly illustration style.

Another way to further specify the kind of image we want is to add modifiers. There are all kinds of possible modifiers; feel free to experiment with your own. In the following example, I’ve added the modifiers “vibrant, mysterious, intricate, highly detailed”:

Again the resulting image is similar in many ways, but there’s a good deal more detail and a wider variety of colors.

Now I’ll add one more modifer, “cinematic lighting”:

This modifier changed the composition of the image somewhat, placing the subject further back, among a number of glowing lamps. There’s nothing special about this particular modifier; any modifier might have a minor impact on some images, and cause more dramatic changes in others.

 

Some Artists and Modifiers

Here are some examples of artists and modifiers that you might try using in your own prompts. There’s no limit though — feel free to experiment with using the names of artists you like, or any modifiers that could describe the kinds of images you want to create.

Example Artists

Fantasy Landscape

• Tyler Edlin
•  Mark Simonetti

Fantasy Characters

• Justin Gerard
• Wayne Barlowe
• Victor Adame Minguez
• Jesper Ejsing
• Gerald Brom
• Greg Rutkowski
• Frank Frazetta

Classics

• Da Vinci
• Pablo Picasso
• Van Gogh
• Winslow Homer
• M.C. Escher
• Alphonse Mucha

Sci-Fi

• Jim Burns
• John Harris
• Dean Ellis
• H.R. Giger

Anime

• Studio Ghibli
• Makoto Shinka

Example Modifiers

• 4k resolution
• 8k resolution
• Unsplash photo contest winner
• Trending on artstation
• Deviantart
• #pixelart
• 3d art
• Digital painting
• Blender
• Octane Render
• Unreal engine
• Watercolor
• Oil painting
• Acrylic painting
• Shot on film
• 35mm lens
• Portrait photography
• Portrait
• Character design
• Concept art
• Vibrant
• Textured
• Haze
• Highly detailed
• Intricate
• Cinematic lighting
• Dystopian feel
• Vaporwave
• Birds eye view
• Fisheye lens
• Drone photo
• Mixed media

 

Weaknesses

AIs that can take descriptions and turn them into images didn’t even exist a few years ago, so the technology is brand new and advancing quickly. This means that it’s still got some glaring weaknesses in these early days. (To see how much it’s improved in just a year and a half, check out the original version of this page!)

Multiple Subjects

Try to keep the subjects and concepts that you’re asking it to portray fairly simple. If you ask for more than one subject, it’s likely to meld together features of those subjects into a mish-mash. For example, this image was made from the prompt “The Avengers”:

The AI has a lot of trouble keeping straight which faces and costume elements go with which characters, and the result is a random combination of features from various Avengers.

Hands, Limbs, Faces

Often the AI will generate images of hands, limbs, and faces that are deformed, missing parts, or have extra fingers and appendages. This is especially the case if it’s a busy image with a lot of things going on other than those features.

Here’s an image generated from the prompt “A warrior sorceress casting a spell.” As you can see the hand in the foreground has fingers going off in random directions, and the dagger in the character’s right hand has two blades.

Often the only solution for this is to generate another image using the same prompt. Eventually, it usually can get all the features roughly correct. If that doesn’t work, try simplifying the subject of the image. The fewer elements the AI needs to focus on, the more attention it can bring to each one.

 

Seeds

Stable Diffusion creates an image by starting with “white noise” – a picture filled with nothing but random light and dark pixels. It then gradually adjusts each pixel, so that the image more closely resembles what the prompt describes. It does this repeatedly until it has a finished image.

Because it works this way, it’s not just the prompt that determines what the resulting image will look like; the specific arrangement of random pixels that it starts with also has a big influence. That random arrangement of starting pixels is generated from a single number, called a seed.

A seed is a number that can range from 0 to 2,147,483,647. If you generate an image twice using both the same prompt and the same seed, you’ll get exactly the same image each time. But if you change just the seed, or any part of the prompt, the image will be different. This means that for any prompt you can think up, there are over 2 billion different images that Stable Diffusion can make from it, one for each possible seed value! And given that there’s virtually no limit to the number of possible prompts, it’s easy to see that the number of different images that can be created is basically infinite.

Every time you generate a puzzle image in Puzzle Together, a seed value is chosen randomly. That way you’ll get a different image each time you generate, even for the same prompt. But, what if you like an image but want to just refine it a little bit by changing elements of the prompt? You can do that by specifying the seed value. This way you can re-use the same seed as often as you’d like, rather than having Puzzle Together come up with new seeds each time.

To specify the seed value when you generate a puzzle image, just include “seed:” followed by the seed value, in your prompt. For example:

hd photo of fruit seed:92734991

So, how do you find out the seed value for a puzzle image that you’ve generated in Puzzle Together? Once you’ve generated the custom puzzle, press its Play button. On the next screen where you select the puzzle settings, note that there’s a down-arrow icon in the lower right corner of the puzzle image. Press this button to download the image to your computer. Then look at the image’s filename; it will look something like this:

puzzletogether_5228_3597122867_A-goat-in-a-tuxedo–portrait-by-Renoir.jpg

The second number in the filename, in this case 3597122867, is the seed used to generate the image. So now if you went back into Puzzle Together and entered an image description like this:

A goat in a tuxedo, portrait by Renoir seed:3597122867

…then you should generate the exact same image again. You can now make changes to the prompt to refine the image to your liking, without having to start from scratch each time.

Here is an example of a basic prompt that I started with, and then a couple of variations I made by re-using the same seed and trying different changes to the prompt:

 

Styles

Puzzle Together now features a Styles menu that lets you choose from dozens of different art styles for the images you generate. This makes it easy to try out different looks.

Styles are just a handy shortcut — they work by adding extra words to your prompt, that specify the style using the techniques described above. You can specify a style in your own words by choosing the General style, which does not add any extra words to the prompt you provide.

Also note that if you enjoyed the particular style that Puzzle Together defaulted to in 2023 (a somewhat whimsical and painterly style), you can choose Classic Style from the menu.

 

Controversy

Some people have strong feelings about AI generated images. Because generative AI is trained by looking at images created by people, some consider it to be a form of theft from hard working artists who’ve spent years developing their skills. Others are concerned that as AIs get better at creating images, it will put creative people out of work.

Companies that develop generative AI have taken steps to address the first concern by allowing artists to opt out of having their work included in the AI’s training set. Stability AI, which develops the models used by Puzzle Together, excludes artists from their training set who have opted out at haveibeentrained.com.

Those who champion AI generated art argue that it puts creative expression in the hands of everyone, and that AI learning by looking at the works of others is no different from how human artists learn to create.

The ball is in your court to determine whether this issue concerns you and where you stand on it. AI image generation is an optional feature in Puzzle Together; while you can use it to open up infinite new possibilities, without it you still have thousands of photographs and traditional artworks to choose from.

 

Ownership

Images you generate within Puzzle Together are in the public domain (Specifically CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication). You are free to download them, modify them, publish them, or do whatever you’d like with them.

 

Useful Links

There are many resources online full of ideas for getting the most out of your Stable Diffusion prompts. Here are a few:

Prompt Guide

15 Stable Diffusion XL prompts + tips

Top 40 Useful Prompts

106 styles for Stable Diffusion XL

StableDiffusion Subreddit

 

Examples

Here are a bunch of examples of nice images, along with the prompts used. These are just some ideas to spark the imagination; the possibilities are truly limitless. The seed values are also provided in case you want to generate the exact image, or create variations by refining the prompt.