Regarding what #3 said about "Did this last week, worked perfectly"

• I've had great results too, but you need to think about commercial safety.
• Adobe Firefly Image 3: I'm really happy with this one. No copyright worries since it's trained on licensed stock, and the leather texture details are super clean.
• Leonardo AI Pro Plan: Works well for shoe designs, but watch out for data privacy on public generations. No complaints with either for a fast launch.

In my experience, Midjourney is too unpredictable for serious product work because you cannot control the details. I've tried many tools over the years, and Stable Diffusion is definitely the safest bet for clean, repeatable shoe mockups if you run it locally. Here is why it works for me:

• ControlNet allows you to lock in the exact shoe shape so you don't get deformed laces.
• You can train a custom LoRA on your specific leather textures to get that premium look.
• Local generation keeps your unreleased designs safe on your own machine. You will need a decent GPU to run it locally. I use the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB and it handles photorealistic rendering easily.

> Ive been trying to generate realistic product mockups for my local online shoe store launch next week, and everything it spits out looks like plastic or has weird deformed extra laces. Been thinking about your deadline. Since you only have a week, you dont have time to learn complex local setups. I would suggest looking at Black Forest Labs Flux.1 Dev instead. It is honestly way better at rendering realistic details like shoelaces and fabric textures than Midjourney right now. You can run it online through platforms like fal.ai or Replicate on a pay-as-you-go basis, which will easily fit well under your $50 budget. But be careful with your prompts. Make sure to specify real camera settings like shot on 85mm lens, studio lighting to avoid that weird plastic sheen. Also, if you want something specifically built for ecommerce, you might want to consider Photoroom Pro Plan. It lets you upload a real photo of the actual shoe and just swaps the background realistically. It costs around $15 a month. I would highly suggest going this route because it saves you from fighting deformed AI laces entirely. Just make sure your original mobile photo has clean lighting.

Did this last week, worked perfectly