DALL·E is pretty damn amazing, but it doesn’t need to be the only step in your creative workflow. You’ve probably already seen some mind-blowing crossover pieces using professional tools like Photoshop, After Effects and 3D modelling software.
But for this article, let’s focus on free, cheap and simple tools that take your generations to the next level.
1. Fix faces fast with ARC Face Restorer (free, desktop web)
This one-shot tool tries to rescue facial detail from any portrait, and can turn an unusably ‘weird’ DALL·E output into something you’d be happy to share. It can’t work total miracles (it assumes the face structure is ‘correct’) but usually makes things much less unnerving. It does tend to ‘airbrush’ subjects slightly into the bargain.
It also upscales images to double the resolution: 2048 x 2048. There are no options or settings: simply upload, wait 10 seconds, see your result, and download. (Don’t like it? Too bad.) Unlimited, free to use: give it a go.
2. Edit faces with FaceApp (free then paid, mobile app)
Free 7-day trial, then $39.99/year, iOS + Android: if you’ve got a DALL-E portrait you like, but want to adjust the face with fine control, try using FaceApp instead of re-prompting DALL·E or trying to inpaint. You can adjust hairstyles, facial hair, structural elements like eyes & nose, and other details, as well as running ‘beauty’ filters. Get it here.
3. Animate faces with MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia (free trial, web)
My Heritage is a genealogy website, but also offers an AI face animation tool, originally designed to bring historic photos of your ancestors to life. But it also works with images from DALL·E! Drag and image into the tool and it will generate an MP4 of the character looking around.
Create a free account and you’ll be able to choose from 20 additional animation styles. After a while you’ll hit some kind of limit, and be driven towards a 14-day free trial that ends in a $50+ annual fee if you forget to cancel. (It also tries to verify your phone number, a process that seemed to fail here in the UK.) Pretty fun. Try it for free here.
4. Quickly bring a face to life with Instagram (free, mobile)
For an even quicker version of the above, open your target DALL·E image on your laptop screen, and fire up Instagram on your mobile device.
Then, create a story or reel, choose ‘browse effects’ , then search for ‘Live Photo.’
Choose ‘Try it’, and point your camera at the screen and voila: a slightly iffy animated version of your face!
5. Add stunning zoom effects to photo/3D scenes with CapCut (free, mobile & web, sort of)
Capcut is an incredibly powerful video editing tool full of snazzy transitions and other effects.
Coolest of all, it can perform soft 3D transforms on images, making them feel all the more real.
In the iOS app, bring your images into a project, choose ‘Animation’ and look for Style: here you can choose from Camera Bounce, Camera Shake, 3D Zoom and 3D Zoom Pro – the other style effects won’t really work on 2D images.
You can then bring the videos into a GIF tool to create cool stereoscopic/’3D’ wobblegrams like these:
These precise effects don’t seem to be on offer in the desktop web version, but here you’ll find hundreds of other cool photo transformations, transitions, and overlay effects.
Here’s a stunning example of DALL·E illustrations edited together in Capcut, for example:
Find CapCut in your preferred app store, or try it in your desktop browser.
6. Add some visual spice to illustrations with MotionLeap (freemium iOS app)
LightTricks publishes a slightly confusing array of iOS apps, offering overlapping functionality. I’ll cover the others later, but start out with MotionLeap, which adds motion to static images! You can make parts of the image ‘flow’ like water or fire, add overlays like rain or rising embers, and add visual effects like twinkling light. Get it on iOS or Android.
7. Add colour grading to AI-made ‘photos’ with Snapseed (free mobile app)
This free app from Google contains a handful of powerful (but user-friendly) tools to punch up photo-style images. Make subtle tweaks, or apply more striking effects; choose from a dozen pre-created ‘looks’, or apply changes individually. One tip: when you choose a tool, swipe up and down on an image to reveal the possible settings and choose one, then right to left to adjust the intensity. (i.e: there are more options than merely the buttons at the bottom of the screen.)
You needn’t only use this on photo-style outputs – it can have interesting effects on ‘3D renders’, mockups of 3D artwork, and even certain kinds of illustrations!
Probably quicker than prompting DALL·E for film types! Get it for iOS or Android.
8. Quickly remove backgrounds with remove.bg
It’s dead simple: upload an image, get it back with the background removed. Perfect for plucking subjects from a scene for use elsewhere. To make it easy for the AI, you can also prompt DALL·E for an easy-to-remove texture like ‘plain green background’. (Downscales to 500px, unless you pay.) Try remove.bg.
9. Use Instagram story effects + filters
A subset of Instagram’s story/reel effects can also be applied to photos! Add a photo to your story, click the sparkle icon in the top-right, and see what’s possible. They’re a little chintzy, but paired with an amazing AI-created image, it can still result in a dynamic visual.
(Tip: If you aren’t seeing many options, try adding/trying/saving effects from the ‘browse effects’ gallery while you’re still in video mode – this option disappears after you add a photo. Then, when you later add a photo, recent effects that can be applied to static images [which is only some of them] will still appear in the search bar!)
10. Make a quick collage with these tools
If you want to quickly join your DALL·E images into a collage or grid, try these quick tools:
FotoJet: free desktop web app. You can change the layout, dimensions, border colour (this is under ‘background’) or get rid of the borders altogether (this is under ‘spacing’).
Gandr: free desktop web app. Limited layout options, but does let you drag in an unlimited number of images from you computer to assemble large mosaics very quickly.
11. Make a super-speed photo-video montage
On a Mac (and maybe Windows?) fire up the free Quicktime Player app. Choose ‘open image sequence’, and select a whole lot of DALL·E images. It will then turn them into a video file you can save, but be warned: it won’t go any slower than 24 frames per second, so you’ll burn through all $15 of credit (115 prompts for 460 generations) in just under 20 seconds.
12. Upscale your image to 3x the resolution
If you’re working in print or need to crop-in aggressively without making your DALL·E generation blurry or pixelated, try a free AI upscaling tool. BigJPG will blow it up to 3000px across, or try imgUpscaler, VanceAI, or upscale.media – I haven’t compared them!
13. Use PhotoPea to uncrop photos and create portrait + landscape images
What if Photoshop was totally free and worked in your browser? PhotoPea is that website! While it contains many (if not all) of the features you’d expect from the classic photo editor, I primarily use it to quickly create blank image areas for uncropping and stitching the results back together, as in this process:
Any more tools you’d like to see in this article? Let me know and I’ll add them in a future update.
