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Concept·AI Models & Capabilities·Added 1 day ago

Image-to-image

Also known as: img2img, image conditioning, style transfer

Using an existing image as a reference or starting point for generating a new one. The original image guides the output's composition, style, or structure, and a text prompt steers what changes. Used for style transfer, variations, and sketch-to-render workflows.

Image-to-image generation bridges the gap between editing existing content and generating something entirely new. You provide a source image and a text prompt, and the model uses the image as a structural anchor while applying the transformation described in the prompt. A rough sketch becomes a finished render. A product photo gets restyled to match a brand aesthetic. A landscape image is transformed to a different season or lighting condition.

The amount of influence the input image has on the output is typically controlled by a parameter (often called 'denoising strength' or 'image weight'). A high influence setting keeps the composition close to the original; a low setting lets the prompt dominate. Midjourney's image weight parameter (--iw) and Stable Diffusion's img2img mode are well-known implementations.

Image-to-image is also the underlying mechanism for video generation from images, virtual try-on (taking a clothing item and placing it on a person), face consistency tools, and architectural visualization workflows where a rough model or reference is converted into a photorealistic output. Most AI image generation tools now offer it as a core capability alongside pure text-to-image.

This definition is AI-generated and refreshed weekly. It may contain inaccuracies. Use your own judgment, especially for production decisions.
Related terms
Text-to-imageInpaintingDiffusion modelLoRAMidjourney