Home > Stable Diffusion Interfaces > Fooocus
Foocus Screenshot showing Style menu.
You can find download links and installation instructions on the Fooocus Github page. If you’re not accustomed to downloading and installing software from Github, you might start with a Youtube video that walks you through the process: This Intro to Fooocus shows the installation process, as well as a walkthrough of many interface features.
Fooocus is an easy-to-use application that lets you get started right away with writing prompts to produce beautiful images. You are greeted by a blank screen, with a space to type prompts and only a few other interface controls. Type a short prompt and press Generate, and Fooocus will start generating images right away, with two images generated for prompt by default.
A small warning: The first time you use Fooocus, there is a delay while it stops to download models. Check the "Foocus Launcher" window (yes, it has only two o's) to see messages on download progress. Changing to other Presets (Advanced options, Settings window) may also start Fooocus into downloading additional models for you.
Fooocus gives good results even with short, simple prompts. Just describe what the main subject of the picture should be, its clothing or appearance, and the environment or location where it should appear, and press Generate. You’ll quickly learn that adding words to your prompt can change your image, such as adding “at sunset” or “neon-lit” to explore different kinds of lighting.
If you click the “Advanced” button, you’ll also see a field for a “Negative Prompt” where you can specify what you do not want to see. You can leave that blank at first, but if you start seeing something you don’t want, add it there. For example, if you ask for a fruit bowl in your prompt, but you don’t want any apples to appear in the fruit bowl, you could add the word ‘apples’ to the Negative Prompt. Or if a prompt is causing a person to appear naked in any pictures, you could add a word such as ‘nude’ or ‘nudity’ to the Negative Prompt to ensure that this won’t happen.
Also in the “Advanced” settings, under the "Style" tab, Fooocus gives you an extensive menu of visual styles for your images. Instead of needing to spend a lot of time and effort on ‘prompt engineering’ to develop each look through typing just the right prompts, these styles let you type a basic, straightforward prompt, and they do the ‘prompt engineering’ for you, adding words to the prompt behind the scenes. (If you want to see the expanded prompts that Fooocus generated for you, click ‘History Log’ at the bottom of the Settings tab. Beside each image you generated, you can read the full “Fooocus Expansion” of your prompts, showing the words Fooocus added to create your selected styles.
Also in the Settings tab, you can select Aspect Ratios for your images. Sadly, this area of the interface seems less clear and simple than it could be, presenting you with lots of buttons full of cryptic looking numbers. Overall, if you want to generate tall, vertically oriented images, such as portraits of people, you should choose one of the buttons near the top. The button to make square images is in the middle, labeled “1024x1024 | 1:1.” The buttons near the bottom will give you wide-screen, horizontally oriented images, as you’d use for landscape photography, or to recreate a scene from a wide-screen movie.
The "Input Image" check-box in Fooocus opens up a new area where you can provide sample or reference images to help guide your generations, or further process images that you've just generated. After generating an image, you can just drag it down from the main window into the 'Upscale or Variation' tab, and Fooocus and regerate the image into a more detailed, higher resolution image for you. If you want to change your prompt, it can also modify the image according to the new prompt.
The powerful "Image Prompt" tab lets you load in whatever images you want, and Fooocus can generate a scene that uses elements from all the images you imported. An ‘Advanced’ button at the bottom lets you choose how each image will be used:
Advanced also adds "stop at" and "weight" controls. Weight determines the amount of overall influence an image will have on your generation, with no influence at 0 and a dangerously strong influence at values above 1. Stop at controls how far through the image generation process the image will have an influence. For example, at 0.5, the image would provide guidance during the first half of the generation process, but then not have any influence after that. Adjusting "stop at" lets your images contribute to the large-scale overall composition of the image, but stops it from interfering as much with smaller details that might be added later in the generation process.
The ‘inpaint or outpaint' tab is another powerful area for refining or changing images that you have generated. Drag an image down into this tab, and you can also paint a mask of any area of your scene, such as a face or eyes that need more detail and definition, and use the ‘Improve Detail’ mode to inpaint that region at a higher resolution, adding detail and refinement to the areas that need it.
Beyond the Presets (at the top of the Settings tab), which will download and use different Stable Diffusion models for you, you can also download and install any custom-made Stable Diffusion model you want, as long as it is based on SDXL. So, if you hear about a new SDLX-based model on the Stable Diffusion subreddit, or see any SDXL-based model on Civitai.com, go ahead and download the .safetensors file. After downloading, just drag the file into the models/checkpoints folder within your Fooocus install. In Fooocus’s Model tab, press "Refresh All Files" if necessary, then choose the newly installed model, and you’re ready to start generating pictures using it. Advanced users can even experiment with installing LoRAs (smaller models that modify the main model) which you can drag into the Loras folder. This YouTube video includes several topics, including more about using custom models and LoRAs in Fooocus.
While other interfaces add even more options and controls, Fooocus is surprisingly deep and versatile for such an easy-to-use package. It’s easy to recommend Fooocus, not just as your first package, but as one that you might keep coming back to for its combination of simplicity and well-tuned advanced features.
Copyright © 2024 by Jeremy Birn
Welcome to the Internet! Websites use cookies to analyze traffic and optimize performance. By accepting cookies, data will be aggregated with all other user data.