For my recent “Baldur’s Gate 3 Revisited” article, I wanted an image of the older Jaheira and Minsc together. This sounds simple, but ended up being frustratingly difficult due to two issues.

“luis royo painting;fantasy;(age 50 czech half-elf woman,sarcastic laugh,raised eyebrow) and (large bald cherokee bodybuilder) pose together;(half-elf woman,weathered,druid,brown eyes,gray hair in rows of short beaded braids,leather scale armor);(bald cherokee man,large purple face tattoo,smooth skin,friendly smile,barrel-chested,barbarian armor,brown eyes,tiny hamster on shoulder);in the forest“

1) The AI hates rendering women between the ages of ~35 and ~70. Its not hard to get it to work in a solo image, but combined with anyone else its a real pain. It loves rounding 50 down to 30 or up to 80.

2) It is often difficult to get middle-aged men without facial hair. Again, you can juice it pretty well in a singleton image, but with multiple characters its far harder. Its also massively inconsistent with his tattoos.

So in about 50-60 renders the best I was getting was the below. To be fair that is a near *perfect* older Jaheira – complete with the way she’s looking at Minsc. But that beard and tattoo just weren’t cutting it.

So I first tried using my go-to tools in the OpenAI Image Editor – “Remove” and “Inpaint” to get rid of the beard. That did not produce very satisfactory results.

So after fighting a bit more, I tried something different. “Search and Replace”. I tried a few different variations, and then settled on remove “facial hair” and replace with “smooth skin”. The result did a great job editing out the beard… but also removed his tattoos. And really went to town on Jaheira as well… Sheesh!

However, this was the best job yet at removing Minsc’s beard, so I took the upper right corner of that image and pasted it over the original to produce this:

So now it was just a matter of adding back Minsc’s tattoo. Which proved surprisingly more irritating than I expected. I experimented with the Face Editor and Inpainting tool, and mostly got results like this with phrases like “purple tattoo” or “spiral purple tattoo”:

Until finally through trial and error Inpaint with “purple war paint” gave me this:

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