How to Write Ultimate Midjourney Prompts: Prompt Engineering Made Easy

Midjourney AI is a highly sophisticated generative AI model that has the immense potential of turning your textual description into jaw-dropping artwork. 

Midjourney AI is a product of Midjourney Research Lab, which consists of a small group of AI professionals. Midjourney AI was launched on Discord as a bot thus you need to use a few Midjourney commands to interact with it.

All generative AI models including Midjourney AI require input from users in the form of textual descriptions technically known as prompts. Prompts are like gas for Midjourney and other generative AI models. Without prompts, the text-to-image art generators/ generative AI models will not take you anywhere.

Hence, in this article, you will learn what is prompt, multi prompt, prompt weights, and eventually how to write ultimate Midjourney prompts.

The specialty of Midjourney is that it outperforms its primary competitors, such as DALL.E 2 and Stable Diffusion with even light prompts. So, let’s start with simple Midjourney prompts.

What are Midjourney Prompts?

Prompts are text descriptions in natural human language that conveys the user’s ideology to Midjourney and other generative AI models.

Prompts can be very simple and single-lined or they can be vague. Midjourney even accepts and interprets emojis as prompts!!!

For a single prompt, Midjourney generates four images. You can upscale or generate more variations of any of these images. Click “U” for upscale and “V” for making variations while using Midjourney Discord bot.

Examples of Simple Midjourney Prompts

1. Moon 8k
2. a beautiful woman in saree
3. sailboat in the dusk
4. a fantasy landscape, using watercolors, include details like trees

As a newbie, these are a few simple prompts I came up with for Midjourney.

Tips to Write Ultimate Midjourney Text-to-Image Prompts

Now, let’s move on to how proper prompts should look like. To reap outstanding results from Midjourney, it is essential to structure your prompts. Structuring a prompt is nothing but placing certain styling and quality keywords, and art jargon in a way that Midjourney understands.

To write ultimate Midjourney prompts, just add the below-discussed elements in your prompt. You need not to include all of the elements discussed here, you can add them according to your requirement.

These tips have already been discussed in one of our viral articles, so I will keep this short.

A good prompt must include a:

• Noun: Obviously, you must be including a noun in your prompt unless and until you are using emojis, stickers, or GIFs as prompts. Adding a noun or multiple nouns will give Midjourney a clear view of the subject.
• Adjectives: Oftentimes, adjectives are the hero of my Midjourney prompts. Adjectives, such as mesmerizing, magnificent, hyper-realistic, smoky effect, colorful, etc. brings impressive effect to the artwork. You don’t need to be vague, let the adjectives do the magic! Just by adding a few adjectives, you can welcome outstanding results.
• Artist Names: Like adjectives, just by mentioning artists’ names in your prompt, you can effortlessly mimic all their artistic touches. Finding and adding an artist name in your prompt will not be a headache task with our article “List of Artists Supported by Midjourney, which has over 600 artists along with their field of work.
• Styling Jargon: Next, you can specify what kind of style you want. Adding a specific style gives you more control over adding an artist’s name in your prompt. You can use styling keywords, such as pixel art, digital art, fantasy, surrealism, symmetry, contemporary, modern, minimalism, and so on. There is a slew of styling keywords and their pictorial representation is available on this spreadsheet for free. 
• Quality: You can specify the quality of the artwork in your prompt. Generally, if you use the styling word digital art, you will get good quality art. Otherwise, you either need to add quality keywords, such as high-quality, 4k, and 8k, or add the quality parameter “–quality 2” in your prompt. The Quality Parameter will define how long the AI spends creating your image. The value of 0.25% represents 25%, 0.5% is 50%, and so on. “–quality 1” is the default value for all the artwork.
• Aspect Ratio: Aspect ratios (–ar) are another parameter of Midjourney just like “–quality”. By using aspect ratios, you can change the resolution of the artwork that Midjourney generates. The default aspect ratio is 1:

  

• Art Platform Names: Adding art platform names let you utilize the styles that you don’t have any clue about. Try adding keywords like “trending on artstation, trending on Behance, Unreal Engine, Weta Digital, Wētā FX, WLOP”, and etc in the Midjourney prompt will result in the style pulled from these platforms.

• Art Medium: Another easy-to-use keyword to get a variety of images is adding art medium names, such as pencil art, ink art, oil pastel, watercolor, wood/ marble sculpture, silhouette lines, etc.

That’s it. A good prompt must have all or most of these elements.

Advanced Midjourney Prompting

Now that you know what a simple prompt is and the elements of a good prompt, let’s move on to advanced Midjourney prompting techniques.

A more advanced prompt will establish clear communication between you and Midjourney. A better understanding leads to better artwork.

In advanced Midjourney Prompting, you will learn the usage of multi prompts, text weights, and negative weights.

Multi Prompts

Multi Prompts in Midjourney are used to indicate to the Midjourney bot that two or more concepts are used in a prompt.

Multi prompts are used to gain more control over certain words in a prompt. By gaining more control, you will get the optimal artwork according to your imagination.

In most cases, users of Midjourney uses multi prompt if they want to differentiate the open and closed compound words, such as hot dog, jellyfish, cotton candy, peanut butter, street light, fire truck, full moon, etc.

To use multi prompts in Midjourney, you need to add “double colon (::)” in your prompts, immediate next to the word that you want to separate.

The actual result for the open compound word “flower bed”:

The result for multi prompt:

Multi prompts can be used to denote two or more separate concepts or simply to get a different variety of artwork than normal.

Prompt Weighting

Prompt weighting, or text weighting in Midjourney, is a concept that indicates the importance of the word you added weight to.

If you want Midjourney to focus on a particular element of your prompt, you can add weight to that part alone. Let’s see how.

Look how the weight works for the word “midnight”.

Note: If no weights are specified in your prompt, it defaults to 1. While Midjourney versions 1, 2, and 3 only accept whole numbers as weights, version 4 accepts decimals.

Negative Prompts

So far, we have seen what components to include in a prompt to get the desired outcome.

Now, let’s talk about how to eliminate certain attributes from AI-generated artwork. To do so, you need to use the “–no” parameter or negative weight.

Image as Midjourney Prompts

In Midjourney, you can even input images as prompts along with a text description. To do so, you need to upload any of your images into the Midjourney Discord.

Then, open the URL in a new tab to copy the URL.

Lastly, paste that URL, followed by type your text prompt as shown in the image below.

You can also upload an existing URL from the Internet. I.e., from Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels, and more. Either way, you have to open the image in a separate tab to capture the direct URL of the image.

Does Midjourney accept multiple image URLs?

Yes, Midjourney accepts multiple image URLs in a single image prompt. Multiple image URLs are used to blend the characteristics of images. By using multiple URLs, you will get a blend of all the images that you have uploaded.

The format for multiple image URLs is,

Conclusion

The article begins by introducing simple mid-journey prompts and then delves into the fundamental elements that should be included in a good prompt. It then moves on to cover advanced prompting techniques. Finally, the article discusses the image as a URL feature.

By going through this structured information, anyone can easily interact with Midjourney AI.