Unlock Your Creative Potential: A Beginner's Guide to Prompting in Midjourney V7

Welcome to the world of Midjourney, where your imagination can become stunning visual art. This guide will give you the basics of prompt crafting so you can get the most out of Midjourney, and create the images you envision. Let's dive in and turn your ideas into reality!

Your First Steps in Prompting

Test the Waters

Before we get started, let's make sure everyone is comfortable with the platform. Drop a "hi" in the chat, tell us your favorite color, or just type "beep boop" if you're feeling robotic. This is just to make sure you can participate and ask questions as we go along. Don't be shy!

Midjourney: More Than Just an Image Generator

Have you ever found yourself lost in Midjourney, creating image after image? It's easy to binge because it's like watching your own imagination come to life. Midjourney can even change the way you see the world. It can boost your brainpower by creating new physical pathways. If you use Midjourney a lot, your brain might get better at noticing visual and artistic details. This is because you are regularly stimulating your visual cortex. You might even start thinking, "That would make a good prompt!"

Why Your Prompts Might Not Be Working (And How to Fix It)

If you're new to Midjourney, you might be wondering why some prompts work better than others. Here's a quick breakdown to help you understand:

• Control the Canvas: If you don't specify something in your prompt, Midjourney will fill in the gaps using its "best guess." Make sure to control all the details that you care about. This is called "anchoring" or "pinning" the details.

• Efficiency Matters: Each prompt is a job on Midjourney's servers. If your request takes too long, the AI might start blending, dropping details, or getting weird. That's why it's important to write efficient prompts.

• Avoid Chaotic Tokens: Don't use conversational instructions (unless you're in conversational mode). Also, avoid prompts that read like a novel. Focus on visual content.

• Grammar and Structure: Grammar and punctuation matter because of how tokenization works. Midjourney looks at the structure of your prompt to understand how the words relate to each other. Don't just list words; create a sentence.

In short, if you don't take control, Midjourney will make choices for you. And that's often when things go wrong. To enhance your Midjourney experience and automate your creative workflow, check out the Midjourney Automation Suite from TitanXT.

How Midjourney Works: A Peek Behind the Curtain

Diffusion and Denoising Explained

Midjourney uses a process called diffusion to create images from your prompts. When Midjourney was trained, it learned how certain pixel patterns correspond to words. It matched pixel patterns to text from alt text, nearby text, human-made tags, and AI-generated tags. Now, when you type a prompt, Midjourney follows those rules to refine an image step by step. It makes billions of tiny adjustments to the pixels until it's satisfied. This process is called denoising.

The Role of Seeds

A seed is the random visual noise that Midjourney is denoising into an image. Midjourney never starts from a blank canvas. It either starts from this random visual noise or from an image it's already made. If you use the same seed with the same prompt and settings, you should get a copy of the image. But there's a catch: Midjourney assigns your job to a random GPU every time. That means your seed value isn't locked. The only value for the seed is probably in testing.

Controlling the Whole Canvas: Subject, Background, and Style

If you don't control every part of the canvas, Midjourney will play it safe and fill in the gaps with the most obvious thing it can find. That's why you need to control the subject, background, and style of your image. If you want to learn more about prompting, consider using the Midjourney Automation Suite from TitanXT to optimize your prompts and get the best results.

Prompt Ordering: Does It Matter?

Prompt ordering is the sequence of words in a prompt. In older models of Midjourney, prompt ordering was very important. But in version seven, it doesn't matter as much. The main reason to think about prompt order is to create a checklist for your brain so you don't forget to control all parts of the prompt.

The Three Key Elements of a Successful Prompt

Your prompts need these three things: style, subject, and background. If you miss one, Midjourney will just fill in the blanks with the most predictable thing possible. A good template is: style depicting subject background. For example, "a flat cartoon depicting an orange sailboat on a teal sea at night."

Leveraging Archetypes for Efficient Prompting

Use compound subjects to get more on the canvas without using up precious processing time. For example, instead of describing a bunch of ships, you can just say "an armada." Instead of saying "a man, a woman, and two children," you can use the word "family." Archetypes help you create more detailed images with fewer words, saving valuable processing time. Make your Midjourney workflow even faster with the Midjourney Automation Suite from TitanXT.

Optimizing Your Prompts: Archetypes, Invoking, and Describing

When you're losing details, you can take advantage of archetypes. An archetype is the dominant representation of something in Midjourney's data set and rules. You can either describe the thing yourself or invoke the archetype and let Midjourney take care of it with stereotypical details. Using the invoke method makes your prompt more efficient. But you also want to learn to avoid archetypes and use the describe method to control undesirable outcomes.

When to Invoke vs. When to Describe

Learning when to describe versus invoke is an important part of prompting. It asks you to look at the world and see it in terms of its patterns, the same way Midjourney sees pixel patterns. For example, if you want to depict a woman sitting in a cafe but without coffee at her table, you'll have to break the archetype by avoiding using the word "cafe" in the prompt at all.

Using Words That Midjourney Understands

If your prompt contains chaotic tokens, you'll lose control of the canvas. Chaotic tokens are words and phrases that Midjourney doesn't know how to translate into visuals. These include conversational instructions, jargon, and abstract concepts. The fix is to use words that Midjourney actually understands: concrete visual things, specific poses, specific settings, and specific atmospheres.

Key Guidelines for Effective Prompts

• Remove conversation (unless you're in conversational mode).

• Use real sentences.

• Use dense visual language.

The Power of Image References

If you use an image reference, you still want to use a prompt. You absolutely cannot use an image reference without a prompt and still keep control of the canvas. The prompt guides what comes from the image reference. Even when you're using style references, image references, omni references, or character references, you should never travel without a prompt. It's like your passport to success.

Photography Terms: Use With Caution

Technical specifications from photography are popular to add to Midjourney because there's this idea that the images Midjourney examined to learn its rules may have included photographic metadata. But it turns out it's a pretty weak correlation and results in fairly haphazard effects. Midjourney isn't capable of simulating a camera. It's just correlating and denoising. However, you might get a lot out of terms that correspond to iconic photographic aesthetics like Polaroid or Leica.

Wrapping Up

And that's it. With these simple rules, you can start making better prompts and creating amazing images. As you explore Midjourney, remember to play around, test new things, and have fun. To enhance your Midjourney experience and automate your creative workflow, check out the Midjourney Automation Suite from TitanXT.