NightCafe AI & Top 3 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Creativity

How did I Evaluate NightCafe AI and Other Art Generators?

User Interface and Customization Capability

Is the user interface easy and straightforward?  Are there advanced features and customization options?  I personally love the one-click style.  Too many options can become complicated and frustrating.  Compare this with taking photos with the iPhone versus with a professional camera. High-performance tools are great for the specific use case, but they may not be for everyone. 

AI Algorithm and Artwork Quality

Is the AI art generator algorithm “smart” to understand my text prompt?  Do I need to tweak my text prompt for a long time?  Is it producing artwork that I had in mind?  Is it producing artwork that is creative and better than what I can come up with by myself?   If it takes too long to come up with a decent image.  Or if I have to tweak it for a long time.  Or it just cannot get the coloring or style just right.  Everyone has a different evaluation of artwork quality.  Is it beautiful?  Is it style?  Is it the level of creativity you are expecting?  Does the image look coherent?  

Side-by-Side Comparison

I will show you the results of using each of the AI Art Generator Tools using the same text description. You can be the judge of which AI Art Generator Tool is best for your project. 

• Prompt #1: Giraffe wearing sweater and glasses 
• Prompt #2: Beautiful girl with wavy hair, under the ocean, shimmering, photorealism

• Prompt #3: Black cat with golden embroidery design 

Best AI Art Generator Tools Review 

AI Art Tool #1: NightCafe AI

Overview

In my blog NightCafe AI Review: Features, Pricing, and Benefits (2023), I cover these topics.   

• What is NightCafe AI?

• NightCafe AI Overview
• Who is NightCafe AI For?
• NightCafe AI Features

If you have never created AI Art before, and you want to get going right away.  Please check out my blog How to Create Your First AI Masterpiece using NightCafe Studio. It is a how-to guide for absolute beginners with step-by-step instructions and screenshots. 

Evaluation 

User Interface / Customization

The main page for the basic prompt is simple enough. There are many styles to select from so you can get you going.  

There are a lot of advanced options.  You can optimize and make variations of images.  There are options to merge and mesh images together.  However, it will require some time to learn the ropes to get a decent image.  It’s a bit complicated for a beginner.  Using a starter image to generate a photo is not a straightforward process, at least when I tried it.  I actually thought the image that evolved from the starter image didn’t look as good as my starter image.    

Also, when I I tried to generate too many images using the one-image, free AI algorithm “stable” within a short period of time, the tool will ask me to slow down and take a break or generate an image using a “paid” algorithm.  

AI Algorithm / Artwork Quality

Most of the pictures I generated are not coherent.  One example, I asked for a girl with blue hair in the ocean with pink lights, but I get a girl with pink hair.  Another example, I asked for a giraffe wearing a sweater but the image shows a giraffe wearing no sweater.  There is one image that looked totally off.  My impression is that the AI algorithm does not work well. 

Also, the images I generated are not high quality.  It takes many tries and a lot of tweaks to get a decent image closer to what I had in mind.  Yes, you can optimize and evolve the images many times to improve. However, that feels like tedious and time-consuming work. There is a dark and greyish look to the images.  Even when I use the “heavenly” style, there is something off about the images generated.   

There is a community page to get ideas and shows the possibility of what images you can generate.  However, the issue is that the creators hide the prompts they use, so you cannot even learn from others.  

Pricing 

Free using Stable Diffusion algorithm, one image at a time. If you want to generate more than one image or if you want to use other AI algorithms, you need to use the credit system.  There are ways to get free credits each day.  If you just want to try the product, the free credits are quite sufficient. If you decided that you like the product and that you need to use it on a consistent basis, you should buy credit packs or subscription plans.  My blog on NightCafe Review: Features, Pricing, and Benefits (2023) covers the details of the pricing plan.

Bottom Line

This AI art tool is average at best.  The picture qualities are not great, in my view.  Al algorithm generates images that are not coherent.  

AI algorithms don’t work well for me.  The pictures are not great.  Community is not that helpful.  Advance customization options are complicated.   NightCafe may work for people with lots of time to learn the advanced features to get the photos they want.  I would rather spend my time and money on better AI art tools. 

AI Art Tool #2: DALL-E 2

Overview

OpenAI DALL-E 2 was released in April 2022 which sparked a surge of creativity and innovation. The product created a huge splash that no one had anticipated.  People all over the world were blown away by the images that DALL-E 2 generated.   DALL-E 2 set off the first AI art “Wow” moment, triggering what is to become a huge impact on the world.   

Evaluation 

User Interface / Customization

I just love the simplicity of this tool. This is such an easy tool to use. I really feel like you are an artist or designer when you are at the DALL-E 2 website.  There is a modern and elegant feeling at the DALL-E 2 user interface.  You feel like you are creating art, it’s new and beautiful.  When I am at NightCafe or Midjourney, I feel like a configuration engineer or software developer.  There is a clean gallery where you can display the history of your artwork.  

AI Algorithm / Artwork Quality

DALL-E 2 AI algorithm is smart, and can create extremely realistic photo images.  It can combine concepts in new ways, which feels like intelligence.  You can specify what you want to create in the style of a particular artist, and DALL E-2 will do that for you.  You can specify something to be placed in a new environment, and DALL E-2 would be able to do that in a way that almost makes sense.  Using DALL-E 2 is like talking to your friend, who is a graphic artist.  With DALL-E 2, everyone can have a creative superpower at their fingertips. 

One of the limitations of DALL-E 2 is that its image resolution is 1024 x 1024.  That means it’s good enough for a regular computer screen.  However, if you are looking to print the image in a bigger size with good resolution, you should download the image and use another AI enhancer to improve the resolution.  It’s simple enough to do but the function is just not integrated with OpenAI DALL-E 2.  

Also, there are restrictions to generating celebrity-based images. So, the images you generate using celebrity names will just not look like the celebrity.  If this is something that you need to do, you would probably want to use another AI art tool.

Pricing

The pricing is again so simple. You get 50 free credits for the first month, and 15 credits each month after the initial month. This is sufficient for you to play around with it for a day or two.  If you want to generate more images, you can easily buy 115 credits for $15.  It’s quite straightforward.