MidJourney: Prompt Crafting

What is Prompt Crafting?

Prompt crafting is the goal of getting more REPEATABLE results from the model (while not the same picture, figuring out a way to repeatably get a wine bottle on its side for example). This can be a style, a particular scene, working around a specific issue (eyes being strange for example), etc. It is the science and art of finding the right prompt to push the machine model to give you want you actually want.

It's worth noting that it doesn't always mean 100% results - if you go from "1 in 1 million chance to get a wine bottle on its side" to "25% chance of getting a wine bottle on its side" prompt crafting has successfully helped you get what you want out of the tool!

Prompt Crafting is also not just a single method - multi-prompting, long winded descriptions, narrative vs. objective based... These are all tools. As long as it helps with the goal of helping folks get the results they are looking for, it's part of the craft!

Why is it needed?

Without a much longer explanation of how Machine Learning works (a version of which is here), you can settle for computers don't know things the same way as people do. Machine Learning models are trained with specific data (in MidJourney's case, currently Laion 400m), which sets up a model in a specific way, and additionally has some functionality provided by the developers directly. If what you want to do doesn't match up in the source data to the words you are using (to simplify it greatly), or to the additional functionality, you're going to have difficulty getting it to give you the image you want at all, and you'll need to add some additional words to make it happen.

Similarly, getting a somewhat consistent result is generally desirable. If you asked how to do something and were given the chance of it working right once in a million times, that's a lot of randomness you'll need to get through to get what you want. If instead you could get that to 1 in 4, you'd be much better off - right?

Some people use this tooling to create general themes, and are happy with any of the images MidJourney gives them without any work - and that's great! But if you need something specific (or if you need to remove a specific issue that won't go away), you're in the right place!

How do I craft prompts?

This whole wiki is effectively built around this question, and most of the sections deal with this in one way or another. For very specific prompt crafting, there's the MidJourney: Prompt Clips page, while for more general topics you can look through the menu.

There are some prompt crafting tools available online as well. See Prompt Generators.