Installing Stable Diffusion AI image generator

Install the Git client

Install Miniconda 3

• Download Miniconda 3 for your operating system from https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html
• Start the downloaded installer and make sure to install it for All users
  

Clone the Stable Diffusion GitHub repository

• Create a directory for the Stable Diffusion folders and open it in a terminal
• Clone the repository from https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion.git 
  
  • This will create the stable-diffusion directory

• Cerate another directory on the same level: stable-diffusioncd

Download the latest Stable Diffusion checkpoint

• With a web browser navigate to https://huggingface.co/CompVis/stable-diffusion#model-access
• Click the latest stable-diffusion-v-…-original version link
  
• Download the weight. Any of these two files work, but the full-ema produces better quality images, but almost twice as big (7.2 GB vs. 4 GB).
  

Configure the Python environment with Miniconda

• Start Miniconda from the Start Menu
  
• In the Miniconda terminal execute the following lines
  • Create the ldm Python environment
    conda env create -f environment.yaml
    • this will cerate the Conda environment files at C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\.conda\envs
      If anything goes wrong during the environment creation, delete the ldm folder and run this command again.
  • Activate the just created environment
    conda activate ldm
  • 
    

Copy the checkpoint file into the models directory

• Open a terminal in the stable-diffusion directory
• Create a directory for the model
  mkdir models\ldm\stable-diffusion-v1
• Step into the new directory
  cd models\ldm\stable-diffusion-v1
• Copy the downloaded .ckpt file into the models\ldm\stable-diffusion-v1 directory and rename it to model.ckpt
  copy C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\Downloads\sd-v1-4-full-ema.ckpt model.ckpt

To use Stable Diffusion

Activate the Python environment

• Start Miniconda 3 from the start menu
• In the terminal navigate to the stable-diffusion directory
• Activate the ldm Anaconda environment
  conda activate ldm

Generate the image

We will call a Python script with the –prompt argument and type the English description of the image

python scripts/txt2img.py --prompt "a close-up portrait of a cat by pablo picasso, vivid, abstract art, colorful, vibrant" --plms --n_iter 5 --n_samples 1

The image will be created in the stable-diffusion\outputs\txt2img-samples\samples directory

Arguments

To get help on using Stable Diffusion execute
python scripts/txt2img.py --help

• –plms specifies how images are sampled
• –n_iter 5 sets the number of iterations
• –n_samples 1 – the nmber of samples generated

For more information see https://www.howtogeek.com/830179/how-to-run-stable-diffusion-on-your-pc-to-generate-ai-images/