How to use image weights in Midjourney

Consistency and replicability in Midjourney is hard and takes a lot of practice. One way to achieve it is by using image prompts, which means not only do you input a text prompt but you also provide one or more images to the AI model.

There's a very handy parameter called "image weight" in Midjourney that allows you to control how important, or prominent, the provided image should be in the end result. To give you an overview of how this works, I first uploaded a profile photo of myself (which was generated by the AI Lensa, but that's another story). Here it is:

I then used this prompt to get us started:

/imagine <URL to the above image> clay stop motion figure        

As you can see from the image below this gave a wide spread of results where some variants look a lot more like clay figurines than other. And since I was going for a specific style, I need to do something about this. I could try refining my prompt, using additional strong words, but fortunately there's also another solution.

The parameter image weight (--iw) accepts a value between 0-2, where 1 is default. To showcase the result of different values, I use the very handy permutation prompt feature that looks like this:

/imagine <URL to the profile photo> clay stop motion figure --iw { 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75 }        

This will generate six prompts with incremental image weights. Here we go.

Image weight 0.5

Image weight 0.75

Image weight 1.0

Image weight 1.25

Image weight 1.5

Image weight 1.75

The impact of this quite powerful parameter is clear, and it serves as a very useful way of controlling the style of your output, or for replicating the likeness of a photo of a specified person.

That concludes our tutorial for the day, but you're getting some more images from me toying around with my profile photo even though you never asked. ??

Other Midjourney articles I have posted

Are you keen on trying out Midjourney yourself? Here are some other articles I've published on LinkedIn for additional tips and tricks.

• Getting started with Midjourney
• How adjectives can shape your Midjourney AI photographs
• Using weights to tweak your Midjourney prompts
• Using image prompts and seeds to put patterns on things in Midjourney
• Reverse-engineering Midjourney to get those creative prompt words