You can turn Version 4 ON for your generations via (or add to a prompt).
Version 4 support Image prompts! And that's a nuclear bomb. See below!
Emotional Response
The blows your mind. It exceeded my expectations almost every single time. It knows what's "beautiful" for humans and sends it back to us tenfold. It has excellent attention to detail and knows composition perfectly.
And—it seems to become a feature for Midjourney—even when the results are off or glitch-y, they are off beautifully. I encourage you to experiment!
Image Prompts
As a portrait photographer, I am overly fascinated by the limits of Image Prompts. I was very impressed by it in V3, but Version 4 takes Image Prompts to the moon. Thus they will be my focus today.
Meet Francis, a friend whom I photographed in Paris some years ago.
Original photograph
Francis D. (2011)
And that's what happened when I first “fed” that portrait to Midjourney V3.
Sidenote: Francis' portrait taught me another important lesson—the more pronounced a person's features are, the better Midjourney “captures” and “reinterprets” them. Bottom line: choose subjects with strong, pronounced characters, and images with clearly visible and well lit features.
Today, I asked V4 to reimagine the portrait of Francis with a simple addition . For the sake of brevity, I will only indicate that [someone] under each sample below.
As you can see, V4 is crazy good here. It truly catches the character and carefully transitions the style. And it seems to successfully put together even the craziest combinations! (see below)
Even though V4 knows most artists' styles from my experiments, some confuse AI. In some cases, it seems to only apply a part of the style: like light, color, and composition, but not the actual brushstrokes; or use the artist's style as a backdrop or even some scene elements.
I then tried some of my other portrait work, including more detailed, wide-frame scenes.
Original photograph
“Bagrationi 1882” campaign (2021)
Original photograph
Georgian movie director Merab Kokochashvili. Personal project (2017)
From my Complex Portrait Photography course (2018)
Original photograph
From my Complex Portrait Photography course (2019)
Original photograph
French writer Emma Becker (2014)
Andrei Kovalev by Katherine Brook (2018)
I see a lot of people use Midjourney for previsualization in their photographic projects. I think its a very cool idea! In my days *coughs* we used Photoshop to put digital collages together, and some more intricate ones could consume hours to prepare. Let's feed one of those old-school collages to Midjourney and compare the result with text-only prompt generation.
Original image
Photoshopped mockup (digital collage) for my Complex Portrait Photography course (2019)
Image prompt
Text prompt
Multi-Image Prompts
And that wasn't enough, here comes the ground-breaking part. You can feedidjourney two images and see how it magically blends them together. Yes, you could do it in, too. But V4 takes it to a whole new level.
To see how it works, I took a few iconic movie scenes and asked Midjourney to mix them with the portrait of Francis. Note, that when blending two input images together, you don't need a text prompt. So, I skipped it for each of the following cases:
Original movie still
The Shining (1980).Director: Stanley Kubrick, Cinematographer: John Alcott
Image prompt
Original movie still
Blade Runner (1982). Director: Ridley Scott, Cinematographer: Jordan Cronenweth
Image prompt
Original movie still
Get Out (2017). Director: Jordan Peele, Cinematographer: Toby Oliver
Image prompt
Original movie still
The Revenant (2015). Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Cinematographer: Emmanuel Lubezki
Image prompt
Original movie still
2046 (2004). Director: Wong Kar-wai, Cinematographers: Christopher Doyle, Kwan Pun-leung, and Lai Yiu-fai
Image prompt
Original movie still
Predestination (2014). Directors: Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig, Cinematographer: Ben Nott
Image prompt
Of course, I tried blending Francis' portrait with some other images from both photographs and even Midjourney generations.
Original photograph
From my Complex Portrait Photography course (2018)
Image prompt
Original generation
Image prompt
Bonus Track
And what if we try “feeding” Midjourney its own generations while changing the reference style on each step?
Original photograph
Georgian movie director Merab Kokochashvili. Personal project (2017)
Mind. Blown. Thank you, Midjourney! Happy midjourneys, — Andrei
About the author
Andrei KovalevLibrarian
I am a visual artist with 17 years of experience in portrait photography, film, mask design, and education. As Midjourney AI and its analogs are revolutionizing the world of art and our creativity itself, I am overwhelmingly excited to explore the limits of these fantastic new tools and share my findings with the community.
