Midjourney Prompt Engineering

So, you have seen that breathtaking AI-generated art Midjourney offers you, but you're new to your prompt engineering skills and don't know where to start? As with almost any other art tool, playing around with it is crucial and part of the job. Yet, this generative AI tool introduces a new way to create art. Thus, you must also learn the available values and features you can use to mess around with prompts to get the most out of this Artificial Intelligence technology. We've already covered the essence of the Midjourney bot and Prompt Engineering in previous articles. Here, we focus on the tips, tricks, and hacks that you can use to tweak your prompts and take your art to the next level.

What is Midjourney Prompt Engineering?

As you may know, prompt engineering is crafting text instructions and commands to get specific results from an AI Generative tool. Midjourney is an AI art generator capable of giving you stunning, world-class quality, and amazing images out of a single prompt. Thus, Midjourney prompt engineering is how users create and refine prompts to get stellar AI-generated images from this language model.

What is a Midjourney Command?

Simply put, commands are basic keywords you type to the bot to change the default settings and start working with it. If you want a list of all the commands, you only have to type a forward slash "/," and the bot will display it.

The first command you'll probably use is /subscribe, which lets you join a plan if you haven't. /settings will allow you to check and change the standard settings. Finally, the most popular one you can use to get started is /image, which will give you four images based on your written prompt.

Some other commands will let you interact with existing images. For example /blend permits you to combine two images to incorporate their art styles and colors. Moreover, if you're super into a generated image and want to know about the prompt that created it, you can use the /describe prompt. Another super interesting command is /imagine, which lets you generate images based on what you want.

What is a Midjourney Parameter?

Parameters are additional options or values you can play when writing prompts to harness Midjourney's full power. The bot allows you to add as many as you wish at the end of your text prompt. There are many parameters to modify ratio generation, such as the diversity of results, the speed to get the output image, weight, and even to exclude certain aspects. For instance, use the "no water" parameter added to a prompt not to include water in your image. However, you can use only some of them to accomplish your desired result. Let's go deep into the ones you'll use daily.

1. Midjourney Aspect Ratio Parameter

You need a specific width and height to create a perfect image. In Midjourney, you can change the parameters for aspect ratio with –aspect or –-ar. They receive two values indicating the aspect ratio with the following formats –-ar or –-aspect <value>:<value>. For example, if you want an image suitable for a smartphone, "joyous white and yellow cat wearing a hat –-ar 4:7."

On the other hand, if you want an image for a Smart TV, you could switch the aspect ratio to –-7:4. If you're going to use –aspect, remember that it only accepts whole numbers. Temember that the default aspect ratio is 1:1, which are square-shaped images.

2 Midjourney Chaos Parameter

The Chaos parameter is for those who want to get some results that step out of what's conventional. If you're into unorthodox, atypical, or psychedelic designs, you'll want to play around with the chaos parameter during the image generation process. The default (and minimum value) is 0; you can scale it up to 100. There are two ways to change the chaos parameter: –c or –chaos <value>. For example, "a cheerful, young smiling pirate wearing a straw hat –c 65."

3. Midjourney Style Parameter

Thanks to the style parameter, you can easily control how professional the images look in colors, shades, lights, compositions, and overall design. In this case, the default value is 100 and ranges from 0 to 1000. For example, "a cartoon skeleton with a long hat singing and playing the guitar –s 600". So, you may be wondering why everyone doesn't set the value to the top 1000. First, it turns out that as you scale up the style parameter, Midjourney will give less priority to the prompt.

That means you will surely get aesthetic, stylish, and beautiful images, but they will be less connected to your prompt than the ones it would give you with lower stylish values. More artistic images don't necessarily mean you will like them better. Again, it goes down to messing around with the values and experimenting until you get the desired result.

4. Midjourney Seed Parameter

Finally, here's a way to create your designs based on existing style images. The seed parameter will help you get consistent results once you've found a style that works for you. You first need to get the seed number from an existing image reacting to it with the envelope button. Then, the Midjourney seed that generated the image will appear in the chat. All that is left is copying and pasting it next to your prompt with the –seed parameter. For example, "an open treasure chest half buried on the shoreline sand –seed <value>."

Assign Weights to Prompts for Midjourney Images

In a prompt, you can assign weights to images using a double colon symbol "::" next to modify the adjustable parameters or attributes. This way, you can control Midjourney to provide more accurate images.

Think about a captivating image of a futuristic metallic horse and a person with a synth-wave style, like this post about how designers can use AI. The image has two main items: a futuristic metallic horse and a person. Say you want the horse to be more prominent and large in the image. You can assign it a higher value on the same prompt—for example, A synth-wave portrait of a futuristic metallic horse::2 and his owner::1.

How To Use ChatGPT for Midjourney Prompts?

ChatGPT can be extremely useful for quickly getting written representations of your ideas and thoughts. That's particularly helpful if you want to get AI-produced images for abstract topics.

As you could've guessed, adjectives are crucial to getting the aesthetics you're looking for when generating stunning images in Midjourney. You can use them to define the environment, mood, personality, style, humor, colors, impact, etc. You can also ask ChatGPT to give you lists of adjectives you can use to describe these aspects in a given manner. Some popular Midjourney adjectives are colorful, cheerful, glitched, enraged, ghastly, neon lights, joyful, warm, vibrant, and surreal.

Similarly, you can ask ChatGPT to give examples of standard styles and artists and have Midjourney give you images created in their style, for example, minimalist, gothic, morphism, hyper-realistic, vaporware, 3D image, oil painting, anime-style image, 32-bit isometric, watercolor, Pixar animation, etc. In the same way, you can even choose your favorite artists' styles. That's the coolest if you like the artistic talents of Tim Burton, Andy Warhol, Refik Anadol, Susan Hiller, Dan Hillier, Shirin Neshat, Kohei Nawa, Wes Anderson, Rembrandt, and Dr. Seuss.

Conclusion

One more thing you can do to change your design style is to specify the image type you want. This way, you can start your prompt with a portrait, photo, drawing, sketch, or painting. With hundreds or even thousands of styles, artists, and adjectives, this AI-powered Image Generation platform offers endless possibilities to help us create art in the blink of an eye.

Official Midjourney Discord bot is one of the most popular and powerful Artificial Intelligence Image Generators to create beautiful, other-worldly, and captivating content in the art market. As a full-cycle, UX-driven digital agency, we use it and highly recommend it to generate stunning AI-generated images.