-: Now let's get into creating effective prompts.
And I didn't get to mention this before
but what the Midjourney team did was they scraped
all of the photos on the web that were available
for let's say green apples.
And they input 10,000 photos of green apples
from Google Images and from online
and slightly distorted those images
and asked their AI tool to redraw the image
and basically paint it back to its original state
before the distortion.
And after doing this millions and millions and millions
of time for all of the photos available online,
well, virtually all the photos available online,
the AI tool allowed and learned how to redraw
essentially everything from scratch.
And it was assigned to a specific word
or a specific description.
And that's where prompting comes into play.
So Midjourney basically has an archive
and a dataset of what words are connected
to what objects in the real world.
So when we're creating a prompt, we need to clearly describe
to the system what we're looking to have outputted.
So we can do that by breaking it down
in a few different ways.
The first way we can start into this process
is what is our subject of the photo?
And this is almost similar to explaining to a painter
what you'd like the painting to be about.
So you're gonna start with a subject.
You're gonna say okay, I want a person, an animal,
a character, a location, or an object.
So you could say a green apple or an astronaut
or a dog or a wolf, whatever it is.
The subject is gonna determine
the main content of the image.
And then we have the medium, AKA the type of background
or where the art is gonna live on.
Is it a photo, a painting, an illustration,
a sculpture, or a tapestry?
This is gonna change the texture
and the feeling of the output.
After that, we have environment.
Is it indoors, outdoors, on the moon, in Narnia, underwater?
All of these descriptions help further create that look
that you're going for, as if you were explaining it
to a painter who's painting this from scratch.
Next up, we have lighting.
So this is a really important one that creates
an overall feeling, just like when you go
to the movies and the different scenes
that you see have a different look and feel.
A lot of this comes down from coloring and lighting.
So when we want to determine the lighting,
the difference between soft and neon is day and night, okay?
And the difference between studio lighting
versus ambient lighting is day and night as well.
So experimenting, this is really gonna give you
some different looks and feels, which leads to color.
Vibrance and muted are two different styles.
And Midjourney does an excellent job, as you saw
with that samurai example, the difference
between a colorful, vibrant, bright, and sunny
is way different than the much more
monochromatic style that we can go for.
So if you don't add this into the prompt,
Midjourney is just gonna use its random seeds,
which means that it basically assigns a random number
to each one of its prompts or inputs
so that each image comes out unique.
And if you don't add the wording to your prompt,
it's gonna decide what the look
and feel is gonna be for you.
Next is mood, it understands the subtleties
of using terms that we would describe to each other
as humans of the way we're feeling.
We're feeling calm, excited, anxious, mad,
upset, or energized.
It's gonna take that description just from the word
and it's gonna infuse that into the feeling of the image.
And then we have composition.
This is very photography and videography-related
but there's different terms that relate
to different types of framing.
A portrait is gonna be almost like a headshot
or a closeup of a person on camera,
where a bird's-eye view is gonna be similar
to the view of a drone.
And you can also type in the different lens type.
So wide-angle lens, telephoto lens, medium lens.
Some of these may be a little bit more technical
for your understanding of it but we're gonna experiment
with how to use different compositional terms.
So the takeaway from that is that what you tell it to do,
it's gonna take that as an input
and creatively create an output.
What you don't tell it in your prompts,
it's just gonna randomly generate and decide on its own.
So with that said, this is a different way
to look at the different styles and kind of prompts
that you can put into Midjourney.
We have different artists that you can say.
It can even be in a different style of a movie.
So if you say a futuristic samurai in the Matrix,
it's gonna do much more darker, monochromatic,
deep, crushed blacks with a slightly green tint
that all Matrix movies have.
You can also say based on themes,
different themes like minimalistic or surrealism.
And then we have resolution, which we're gonna get into.
Different rendering engines, which is really cool.
The style of Pixar movies and video games
all use different rendering engines
that you can actually input into your prompt
that creates a similar look to the games
and movies that you see, which is pretty fun to mess with.
So we're gonna get into that.
Camera lenses we talked about.
And then effects. Is the image distorted?
Is it black and white?
Is it blurry or is the image super-clear and sharp?
So now that you understand the overview
of effectively creating prompts using these different levels
of what your subject is, what your environment is,
and how you can really decide and paint the picture
for this AI tool to then give you
the output you're looking for,
let's now dive deeper into creating better prompts.