Try different upscalers, I redommend NMKD. You can play with denoising strength to tease out more detail. The upscaler makes the biggest difference though.
But the same upscaler as used in txt2img should work equally well in img2img shouldn't it? Right now it comes out way more blurred than on txt2img, is that due to the missing control over high res steps?
When applying wait you should be wrapping that in () as the first step, if you need more weighting you then add the numerical values.
Afaik the ( ) are just multiplicators, so it's a quick way to emphasise what's more important and what's not. If I write:
(apples), oranges, ((carrots))
then the importance-ratio between those 3 would be 2:1:3.
If you wrap everything into braces, everything is equally important, which means you could've just not used them at all. No?
Second, you're repeatedly applying "instructions" to the same things, potentially conflicting ones as well.
Look at how many times you're mentioning style, or "in the back".
The back instruction is important otherwise one of these things might appear somewhere on the characters level which is not desired. If background elements would conflict (it never happened yet), you can just specificy their postion, e.g. (tall building in the back on the left), (big moon in the back on the right top corner),[...]
And the different styles are intended, so that it doesn't just copy 1 specific style, but rather creates something new considering a wide range of styles. It's just to get down a certain vibe.
Thirdly, with weighting, if you have to go beyond 1.3 it generally means you are doing something horribly wrong or something is fighting off the weighting. It potentially creates artifacts and/or distortions as well.
Interesting. I had situations where 1.3 wasn't enough and higher values got the job done, I might run some X/Y tests with different weighting to see about the articafts and distortions, thanks.
You keep saying you know prompting, to be brutal, you might know MJ prompting where the software fixes a whole bunch of stuff for you, but where there's far less hand holding you're gonna need to learn to write cleaner prompts.
In terms of prompting I don't see any difference between MJ and SD yet. MJ doesn't do hand holding. You also have to be very precise and specific, need negative prompts and also add weighting to the prompts.
Even in this case you're more than likely fighting your own prompt.
Why do you believe that? The OG picture turned out perfectly fine and had every detail I wanted to SD to include. It's actually a good example for prompting as it absolutely nailed the desire vibe, atmosphere, scenery, side lighting, clothing and everything else.