💦 The Complete Gooner's Guide to AI Image Transformation (2026)

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What Is Img2Img and Why Should Gooners Care?

You've been typing prompts like a horny poet for months now.

"1girl, nude, spread legs, cowgirl position, bedroom"

—and the AI spits back some mutant yoga pose where her arm phases through her tit like budget ghost porn. Fifty generations later, you're no closer to the pose you actually wanted.

Img2img changes everything.

Instead of starting from pure text and letting the AI hallucinate whatever anatomical nightmare it wants, img2img lets you feed the AI an actual image—your doodle, a photo reference, an existing hentai panel—and tell it to redraw that image in your checkpoint's style.

Think of it this way: txt2img is asking a drunk artist to paint whatever comes to mind from your vague horny description. Img2img is handing that same artist a rough sketch and saying, "No, motherfucker. Like THIS. But make her hot."

The AI still brings its skill, its understanding of how light hits skin and how tits actually hang when someone's bent over. But it's working FROM your composition instead of guessing.

Which, apparently, makes all the difference.

Img2Img vs Txt2Img: So, What IS the Actual Difference?

Txt2img starts with nothing but your text prompt. The AI generates an entire image from pure noise, hallucinating every detail based on your words. Great for freeform exploration, terrible for precision control.

Img2img starts with an image you provide. The AI keeps the structural bones of that image but re-skins it according to your prompt and checkpoint. Great for pose control, remix work, and iterative refinement.

Why Bother With Images At All?

"But I can't draw!" you're whining. "I became an AI porn connoisseur specifically because I have zero artistic ability."

Valid concern.

Here's why you should still care about img2img:

Faster Iteration

You know how many gens you burned last week trying to nail "legs spread, knees up, hands behind head"? Probably fifty or more. With img2img, you spend thirty seconds in MS Paint drawing stick figure lines for the pose, run it through once at medium denoise, and the AI goes "Oh, THAT'S what you wanted" and actually delivers.

Remix Power

This is where img2img becomes genuinely broken in the best way:

• Got an existing hentai panel you love but wish it matched your checkpoint's style?
  img2img it.
• Found a cosplay photo where the pose is perfect but you want it anime-style?
  img2img it.
• Generated something 90% perfect but the style feels slightly off?
  Run it through img2img with a different checkpoint at low denoise.

Artifact Fixing

Your gen came out almost perfect—composition is good, pose is good, face is good—but there's weird artifacting on the skin or the background looks like someone smeared Vaseline on the camera lens.

Run it through img2img at very low denoise (0.25-0.35). It cleans the artifacts without touching your structure. Like a beauty filter that actually understands what skin should look like.

Denoise Strength: The Slider That Controls Your Destiny

This is the most important concept in img2img. Pay attention instead of just skimming for the spicy prompts.

Denoise strength controls how much the AI "listens" to your input image versus how much it freestyles. Values are on a scale of 0 to 1, where 0 means "I will change literally nothing" and 1 means "I'll your image as a vague suggestion at best."

Low Denoise (0.2-0.4): Light Touch-Up

Your image stays almost identical. Same pose, same composition, same everything—just polished and cleaned up. Artifacts removed, details sharpened. Use this when your gen is 90% perfect and you just need that one fucked up hand fixed or that weird background smear eliminated.

Medium Denoise (0.5-0.7): Style Transfer Sweet Spot

The pose and composition stay, but details change significantly. The style shifts. Colors might change. Faces might look different. This is your go-to range for turning stick figure doodles into actual anime waifus while maintaining the pose you drew.

High Denoise (0.8-1.0): AI Does What It Wants

At this level, the AI is basically using your image as loose inspiration. You'll keep maybe the general color palette or the vaguest sense of composition, but everything else is back to txt2img chaos. The AI said "fuck your doodle."

Recommended Starting Points:

• Cleanup/artifact removal: 0.3
• Style transfer with pose retention: 0.55
• Experimental remixes: 0.75

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Img2Img vs ControlNet vs LoRAs: When to Use What

New gooners get confused here.

"Why do I need THREE ways to control my porn?"

Because they do different things:

LoRAs are style specialists. They know one thing really well—a specific character, a specific art style, a specific outfit or body type. LoRAs don't care about pose. They care about making things LOOK a certain way.

ControlNet is a puppet master. It takes structural inputs—pose skeletons, depth maps, edge detection—and forces the AI to match that structure EXACTLY. When ControlNet says "the arm goes here," the arm goes there or the image fails. Precision tool with a learning curve.

Img2img is the sloppy middle ground. Less precise than ControlNet, more compositionally aware than LoRAs alone. It says "follow this image's general vibe" without rigid structural enforcement.

The stacking strategy that separates casual gooners from Pixiv elite:

Doodle your pose
  → img2img with your checkpoint and LoRA loaded at 0.6 denoise
  → feed result into ControlNet to nail exact positioning
  → final cleanup pass at 0.3 denoise

That's how people make those perfectly consistent character series where the same waifu appears in forty different positions and every image looks like it came from the same artist.

Practical Workflow: From Stick Figure to Spank Material

Step 1: Open whatever trash drawing program you have.

MS Paint works fine. Draw a stick figure in your desired pose. Circle for head, line for spine, four lines for limbs. Maybe circles where tits and ass go if you're feeling detailed. Don't make it good. The AI doesn't care about your artistic ability—it just needs to know where body parts go.

Step 2: Save that masterpiece.

Then load it into your img2img workflow.

Step 3: Write your prompt normally.

"1girl, nude, spread legs, bedroom, looking at viewer, mature breasts, pussy, detailed skin"

—whatever your degenerate little heart desires.

Step 4: Set denoise strength to 0.6 for first attempts.

High enough that the AI transforms your stick figure into something recognizable, low enough that it respects your pose.

Step 5: Goonerate.

Evaluate. Did the AI follow your pose? Great. Pose needs tweaking? Lower denoise. Result too close to your shitty drawing? Raise denoise.

Step 6: Re-generate.

Once you've got one you like, save it and run it through again at LOW denoise (0.25-0.35) to clean remaining artifacts.

Congratulations! You just turned thirty seconds of stick figure doodling into actual fap material. Way to make a deposit into that spank bank, gooner!

Inpainting and Outpainting: Img2Img's Specialized Cousins

Inpainting is img2img for just PART of an image. Instead of regenerating everything, you mask out the specific area you want changed.

• Perfect gen but the face looks weird?
  Mask the face, inpaint it.
• Everything right but the hands are eldritch horrors?
  Mask the hands, inpaint them.
• Image is perfect but she's wearing clothes and you want her not to be?
  Mask the clothes, inpaint them gone.

Outpainting extends beyond the original image boundaries.

• Got a portrait cropped at shoulders but you want to see tits?
  Outpaint downward.
• Close-up face shot you want full-body?
  Outpaint in all directions.

This is how people turn AI-generated headshots into full-body porn without regenerating that perfect face they spent three hours perfecting.

Fuck-Ass Questions (a.k.a. FAQ)

"My img2img output looks nothing like my input!"

Your denoise is too high. Lower it. Start at 0.5 and work up.

"My img2img output looks exactly like my input with weird artifacts!"

Your denoise is too low. The AI doesn't have room to change things. Raise it.

"The pose changed when I didn't want it to!"

Denoise related. Lower values preserve pose better. Try 0.45 if 0.6 is shifting things.

"I'm getting color banding and compression artifacts!"

Your input image is too compressed. Img2img works best with high-quality sources. Use PNG when possible.

"The style isn't changing enough!"

Either denoise too low, or your checkpoint isn't stylistically distinct enough from your source. Going from anime to anime shows less change than photorealistic to anime.

"My inpainting has visible seams!"

Three causes:

1. mask too precise (expand it)
2. denoise too high (lower it), or
3. wrong masked content setting (use "fill" instead of "original")

Advanced Multi-Stage Workflows

The Upscale Workflow

• Generate at base resolution using txt2img.
• Take your best result, run through img2img at 2x resolution with 0.3-0.4 denoise.

The AI adds detail while maintaining composition. Superior to generating at high resolution because txt2img gets compositionally worse at higher res.

The Style Stack

• Generate in Checkpoint A.
• Take result to img2img with Checkpoint B loaded at medium denoise.

You get composition from A but style from B. This creates those "impossible blend" aesthetics that don't exist in any single checkpoint.

The Iterative Refinement Loop

• Start with rough concept image.
• Generate at 0.8 denoise for proper interpretation.
• Take that result at 0.6 denoise for style consistency.
• Run at 0.3 denoise for cleanup.

Each pass builds on the last.

The Hybrid Pipeline

• Generate base with txt2img.
• Then img2img to nail general vibe.
• Then ControlNet for final pose precision.
• Then add LoRAs for character consistency.

Top-tier AI porn isn't made with single techniques. It's a pipeline where each tool handles what it's best at.

The Gooner Takeaway

This should sum it up quite nicely for you smoothbrains out there:

• Txt2Img == horny wishcasting
• Img2Img == horny tracing paper
• ControlNet == horny puppeteer strings
• LoRAs == horny cosplay wardrobe

They all stack together. Img2Img is the easiest "training wheels" for visual control before you graduate to the precision of ControlNet.

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Next Time: ControlNet—The grown-up version of img2img, where your waifus finally have to obey the stick figure instead of just using it as a vague suggestion.

Share your img2img transformations with us on Bluesky (@siren.styx.house) and tag #GOONSQUAD #StyxHouseStudio or #TheNSFWAIPodcast. We'll feature the best before/after comparisons over on Substack.