How to Get Great Images with Midjourney
Distilled wisdom from using Midjourney for a while. Last updated 2024-06-10 -- Peter Kaminski
Someone asked specifically about these portraits, but the advice works for Midjourney in general.
- Practice with Midjourney, learn how the tool works. The more time you spend with it, the more you understand how to get good results. (I've been using Midjourney since August 2022!)
- Browse "Explore" regularly to find interesting things and check out the prompts and settings, try parts of them that look interesting
- Experiment.
- Do lots of reps. Part of getting good images is doing a lot of images, and cherry-picking the best ones. Expect only about 10-20% of images to be really great. (It may be more, but don't feel bad if it isn't.)
- There are different prompting strategies, but one of the strategies I like best is to use the minimum description of the subject to get in the ballpark of what I'm looking for, and let Midjourney do a lot of the work to make the image look great. The more you try to specify, the less it can do to make a gorgeous image. The corollary to this is that you'll need to generate lots of images (see #4 again), and accept the gorgeous ones even if they're not quite what you were looking for. More like a wildlife photographer, less like a studio photographer.
- Conversely, feel free to specify art styles, photographic techniques, camera equipment, etc. at some length. Remember, though, you're not actually specifying exactly what you'll get; rather, you're giving Midjourney some guidance and ideas to influence what it generates.
- For these particular portraits, the subject prompt is very minimal, Portrait, middle-aged (ethnicity) (woman or man). There's a fairly substantial camera gear section, and then --chaos 50 to get lots of variety and --stylize 1000 to make them look polished. (--stylize 1000 works great for many subjects, but not all). In return for letting Midjourney decide what "Portrait" means (rather than giving it a long, specific prompt), it has the freedom to make great portraits. Then to get kind of what I'm looking for, --chaos 50 gives me variety, and then I do lots of images to cherry-pick from.