Midjourney Text Weight Explained

If you are new to Midjourney, you might be intimidated by the numbers in the other users’ prompts that appear on the Midjourney Discord server. Some of you might know that those numbers are called weights but do not know what they are used for.

In this article, you will learn how to use Midjourney text weight to compose images exactly how you want them.

You can instruct Midjourney your requirements more clearly by adding weight to prompts. A text weight in Midjourney is a numerical value that emphasizes a certain subject, object, or style. 

Typically, a text weight can range from -10,000 to 10,000. But, most of the users usually stick with -2 to 2. The range of the numerical value doesn’t matter. All that matter is weights you have added must be relative to each other.

If you don’t know what a negative value means, you can check out our detailed article.

How to Add Text Weight in Midjourney

You can add text weight to any part of your Midjourney prompt accompanied by a double colon (::). The double colon will act as a separator.

Example 1: Midjourney text weight prompt: /imagine prompt: spectral tree::1 inside a paperweight::10

Midjourney text weight

If you wanted to introduce weights in your prompt, it is a good practice to specify weights for almost all elements of the prompt. 

For example, spectral tree inside a paper weight::10 will instruct Midjourney to give a weight of 10 to the whole prompt.

Midjourney text weight

Hence, you need to clearly mention weights as I did in example 1. Midjourney interprets example 1 as per my intention. I.e. it focuses the “inside a paperweight” part over “spectral tree”.

For a better understanding of text weights, take a look at the following examples.

Example 2: /imagine prompt:spectral tree::10 inside a paperweight::.

Weights are set to 1 by default if none are specified. Contrary to example 1, this prompt will instruct Midjourney to give more weight to the “spectral tree” part over “inside a paperweight”. You can clearly see this in the below image.

Midjourney text weight

Example 3: /imagine prompt:spectral tree::100 inside a paperweight::1

This prompt exactly works the same as example 2 but gives 10x more weight to the “spectral tree” part.

Midjourney text weight

You might have a question regarding the total elimination of the “inside a paperweight” part of the prompt in this example since it has a very lower weight compared to the “spectral tree” part. If you eliminate the “inside a paperweight” part, you will not get the mist-like style that surrounds the tree.

When to Use Text Weight

You can use text weights in a prompt that contains different objects, styles, and attributes. If you use text weights for similar objects, styles, and attributes, Midjourney struggles to produce clear output.

However, this may change in the future update. In case, you want to apply weights on the same nature of objects, style, and attributes, try upscaling or rerunning your prompt.

Example: a bowl of kiwi::, apples::5, and blueberries::10

The above prompt has to instruct Midjourney to focus more on blueberries following apples and lastly kiwi. But, Midjourney often gets confused due to the same nature of the subject.

Midjourney text weight

The above result shows that Midjourney has failed to generate the required output. Instead of generating kiwi, apples, and blueberries in a bowl, the AI-generated a fruit that is a combination of apples and blueberries.

Why Do Prompts Need to be Weighted?

Though Midjourney supports a lengthy or vague prompt, it will not bring effective results as the AI doesn’t clearly understand the meaning of your prompt.

Adding text weights to prompts will help to segment and emphasize certain objects, styles, and attributes in your prompts.

The segmentation of prompts and emphasizing certain phrases will give you complete control. 

Prompt without text weight: A bowl of mixed fruits that includes a few apples and blueberries and more grapes

Prompt with text weight: A bowl of mixed fruits that includes apples::1, blueberries::1, grapes::2

Considering the above two prompts, Midjourney clearly understands the prompt with text weights.

Conclusion

Implementing text weights in your prompts gives a great amount of clarity to Midjourney. Better the clarity better the result.

You can input any number between -10,000 to 10,000 for text weighting. Though any number of weights works, higher relative values yield a better result than lower relative values. For example, 10:1 will be better rather than 1:1, 2:2, or 2:3, etc.

Also, Midjourney text weights tend to do better jobs when it applied to different objects, styles, or other attributes.

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