How to run Stable Diffusion on your Mac
AI imaging has quickly become a popular – and somewhat controversial – pocket of the internet, so you might be wondering how you can use apps like Stable Diffusion on your Mac. Stable Diffusion can easily create AI images on your Mac with the right workarounds, and it’s not difficult to set up.
If you compete with others to create the craziest or most beautiful AI art you can, you might have been disappointed to learn that apps like Midjourney or Dall-E require extra hoops like a Discord account. Stable Diffusion is a much simpler setup. Here’s what to do.
How to Download Stable Diffusion on Mac
Step 1: Make sure your Mac Stable supports Diffusion – there are two important components here.
First, you need an M1 or M2 Mac for this download to work. Earlier Macs do not support the app. If you have an older Mac, that’s fine – check out some of our alternatives below.
Second, you should update to the latest version of macOS Monterey before attempting to use Stable Diffusion – these are relatively new download options that may not work with older versions of macOS.
Step 2: Visit the DiffusionBee website. Find the Download for macOS button and select it.
Step 3: The installer will start downloading. Wait for it to finish, then open it and push DiffusionBee into your applications to complete the installation. Once it’s done, open DiffusionBee.
Step 4: At the top of the app you will see that you are on the tab text to the image, which is where you should be for typical image generation (the other tabs seem a little buggy at the moment anyway). Directly below you will find a text box where you give instructions to the AI image.
Step 5: Enter your image description as you would enter tags, with key phrases separated by commas. Start with a detailed description of the image you want, with the most important motifs and descriptions listed first. Then list all the important attributes you want for the image, such as: a painting or photo style, high detail or blurry, light detail, etc. You can also list direct sources of inspiration for the AI to draw from, e.g. B. a TV show or a certain painter or a landscape.
Step 6: In which Expanded options Section you will also find options for adjusting image size and similar important parameters. When you are done with all the adjustments, select to generate.
Step 7: If the generation doesn’t work, try again a few times – the AI may need a few tries to generate a full picture for you. Once generated, you can copy or select it save Image to download it.
Alternative 1: Use a web app
If you have a Mac that won’t run DiffusionBee, all is not lost. There are other options to take advantage of Stable Diffusion’s AI image generation capabilities, and you might not even need to download anything. Here’s one of our favorite alternatives:
Step 1: Go to the Hugging Face AI generator. Hugging Face uses Stable Diffusion for image generation, so you get results similar to downloading. Their options aren’t quite as advanced, but they’re very good, and all you need is a reliable internet connection.
Step 2: Enter your command prompt (currently advanced options are not available so skip this section). When you’re done, select generate image.
Step 3: The AI will generate four(ish) different images based on your prompt. If one of the images is exactly what you were looking for, you can select it to download and copy. You can also keep generating images until you find something you like.
Alternative 2: Use a Photoshop plugin
On the other hand, if you use Photoshop frequently, there is an additional option that you can try. Christian Cantrell has developed a plugin to add Stable Diffusion to Photoshop: you can find and download it here.
The benefit of this approach is that you don’t need a second app to use your imaging capabilities. Also, you have access to all the advanced options that Stable Diffusion can support, and editing tools are readily available to tweak the image to your liking.
However, it is a third-party app and is very new at this point. That means it can introduce bugs and cause other difficulties. Make sure you have the latest version of Photoshop before attempting to download it, and be prepared to disable the plugin if you run into problems.
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