It seems like we do not yet have a post about Dall-E 3. It was announced a few days ago and can now be tried via bing image creator (long wait times).
I think it is worth mentioning, because it seems like a big jump.
I spend quite a lot of time playing around with Dalle mini, Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion in its many flavours and it was generally the case that it was very hard to get specifically what I wanted, to the point where I was disillusioned and few of my projects materialised.
A teddy bear and a panda bear holding hands - it took until SDXL for that to work out at least occasionally (the wedding was long over).
Maritime paintings of awesome sailing ships - the rigging was generally completely messed up (finetuning on Montague Dawson and Co didn't help).
Comic books aka Prince Valiant fan-fic - impossible to reliably get specific poses or situations involving several characters.
Mammoths in space - don't ask, but I had to do the space hangar in SD and the mammoths in Dall-E and bash it all together.
The Stable Diffusion eco system build around these shortcoming with control nets and finetuned models and increasingly complicated workflows - but now it seems with Dall-E 3 many more things just work right out of the box.
From my few experiments and the examples I have seen elsewhere this might be the point where image generation just works.
Hu, actually I never tried just the face, I needed at least the upper torso and preferably the full figure.
Anyway, I spent a few hours today toying with that generator (I previously used mostly this). A very simple prompt like "An elf made out of green metal" can produce a somewhat okay result, but the elf will be either naked or dressed head to toe in green. You can try to add more bits to the prompt in a controlled manner: hair color/hairstyle, outfit/dress color, and the like, but the more details you add, the more the model is prone to forget some of them, and the first to be forgotten is often the most important (being made of green metal).
To be clear, the success rate is not 0%. I was eventually able to obtain an image kinda resembling what I wanted, but I had to sit through >200 bad images and it definitely wasn't an easy task. For these kind of things, we are totally not at the point where image generation "just works" (if you instead need a generic fantasy elf, sure, then it just works on the first try).