I recently began exploring the world of AI Art with Midjourney.
It's an online tool that can bring anything from your imagination to life, no matter how
surreal or abstract.
If you're new to AI art, Midjourney is perhaps the best-rated for creating visual art.
You enter a series of prompts and the AI will do its best to depict your written command.
It can generate a wide range of art styles, from painterly effects to hyper-realistic
renders.
Midjourney is a bot that runs on the chat platform Discord so you first need to set
up an account there, then join the Midjourney server via the Midjourney website.
Here's where you can see all kinds of weird and wonderful creations from the Midjourney
community.
To create your own piece, enter one of the Newbies groups.
Add your own job to the constant stream of activity by typing /imagine, followed by a
brief description of your idea...
Such as "Cute panda wearing a baseball cap"
The Midjourney bot will get to work generating your images, but you'll soon discover that
this public group is way too hectic.
You'll quickly lose your place in the conveyor belt of thousands of requests and results.
If you scroll up again you can look out for your own entry being highlighted with a yellow
background, but it will disappear again within seconds.
Instead, click the little Inbox icon in the top right and you'll find an option to Jump
to your most recent result.
You can now adore your randomly generated images of cute pandas wearing baseball caps
in a grid of four squares.
Each result is unique, some may be exactly what you had in mind, others might be nothing
like what you wanted!
This guy is pretty cute!
Before you get too carried away though, remember that as a free user you only have an allowance
of 25 jobs.
It's enough to get to grips with the tool, but it's necessary to subscribe to a paid
plan to get any real usage out of it.
Plus, the main benefit of a paid plan is being able to chat with the bot privately so you
don't have to try and keep track of your own creations in these fast-paced public groups.
Type /subscribe in the message box and follow the link to the signup page.
The $10 plan might be tempting, but 200 jobs per month isn't really much of an allowance.
Personally I went for the $30 per month option.
Once you're a premium subscriber, find the Midjourney bot in any group, right click on
it and choose Message.
You can then interact with the bot directly in your Discord direct messages inbox.
You can see I've recently been finding what our family car would look like as a rally
car... the possibilities are endless!
Now when you enter your command it won't get lost amongst everyone else's creations.
Alternatively, you can also create your own server within Discord and invite the Midjourney
bot.
This can help to keep your projects organised.
Give your server a name, then head back to the main Midjourney server to find the bot
again.
This time left-click it and choose Add to Server.
Now you can enter your own server on the left and chat with the Midjourney bot as usual....
/imagine, followed by your command.
Once you have your results, you have a few options.
You can Re-roll to regenerate a completely new set of images.
Just like if you were to draw something by hand, every result is going to be unique,
it might be very similar with slight variations, or it might be a completely different interpretation.
Sometimes it takes several re-rolls for the AI to figure things out.
If you don't get what you're looking for the first time, give it a re-roll to see what
it produces on a second or third time before trying different prompts.
The other buttons refer to the four grid squares, 1, 2, 3 and 4.
The top row is Upscale, to reproduce a version of that exact result, whereas the bottom row
is to make four new variations of that picture in a similar style but with slight differences.
For example here's four variations of this cute panda, all of which look similar, but
the AI has decided to adjust random things.
It isn't possible to specify exactly what you want to change, so it's worth remembering
to allow the AI to realise vague concepts you have in mind, rather than try and make
it create something really specific.
Once you've upscaled an image, it has now been reproduced at a higher resolution.
From here you can either open in browser and save the image, or try to upscale it further
with Light Upscale Redo, or the Beta option.
It's worth just trying both and compare the results.
One is sharper, more detailed and a higher resolution than the other, but look out for
weird glitches.
No doubt different upscaling algorithms will be added in the near future, so hopefully
one day we'll have the option to export even larger images.
Now you've created your first AI piece, the next step is to begin exploring some of the
settings and to experiment with different prompts.
I'm planning on creating more Midjourney videos in the near future so if you're new to my
channel I hope you stick around to join me as I share all the Midjourney tips, tricks
and techniques that I've learnt.