Clarinet’s Troubleshooting Midjourney Text Prompts

Discord Contact: @whatnostop (clarinet)
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Last updated by @whatnostop (clarinet)  6:00 PM CST 10/25/2023

1. Prompts tend to benefit from this soft template guideline.

This is not a hard rule, but a soft suggestion that many people use to improve their prompting.

Midjourney --v 5.x Soft Template

Midjourney --v 4 Soft Template

Midjourney --v 3 Soft Template

Midjourney --test / --testp Soft Template

Output of v3 example: https://www.midjourney.com/app/jobs/49c34178-5067-4f29-bcc6-5a2671d425a1/ 
Output of test/testp example: https://www.midjourney.com/app/jobs/07d72d6b-26f0-48df-a568-176f3791e9a4/ 

(Multi-prompts should belong to only one category and then sorted into that category.)

2. Prepositional phrases aren’t reliable, so try these other methods instead.
   

✅Use adjective-noun word order to replace prepositional phrases.

Replace prepositional phrases with evocative adjectives.
🌐 What Is a Prepositional Phrase? | Grammarly

• “hair flowing in the wind” ➡️ “flowing hair”
• “eyes the color of sunset” ➡️ “sunset eyes”
• “a carrot for a nose” ➡️ “carrot nose”

✅Use very specific verbs to replace prepositional phrases.

Replace vague prepositional phrases with evocative verbs.

• “a girl with a flashlight” ➡️ “a girl using a flashlight”
• “a girl with some cake” ➡️ “a girl eating cake”
• “a girl feeling sad” ➡️ “mourning girl” or “grieving girl” or “depressed girl”
• “a girl with a big smile on her face” ➡️ “smiling girl” or “happy girl”
• “a sword on its side” ➡️ “a discarded sword”

✅Use very specific vocabulary to replace prepositional phrases.

You may see improved results when you replace vague words with specific words.

• “a girl in a forest sleeping” ➡️ “a forest shelters a sleeping girl”
• “a girl walking on a spaceship” ➡️ “a spaceship corridor contains a striding girl”
• “a girl with a recurve bow” ➡️ “a female ranger equipped with a recurve bow”

✅Try reversing the order of details.

This method adjusts Midge’s focus and may increase coherence.

• “rainbows reflected in the pond” ➡️ “the pond reflects rainbows”
• “a bee hovers over a flower” ➡️ “a flower visited by a bee”
• “a storm above a ship” ➡️ “a ship threatened by a storm”
• “a basket filled with blueberries” ➡️ “blueberries contained by a basket”
  

✅Try to reduce redundancy.

Look for places where your adjectives are already baked in. Eliminating a token reduces the number of combinatorial outcomes, which may increase coherence.

• “black obsidian” ➡️ “obsidian” (is already black)
• “botanical plants” ➡️ “botanicals” (are already plants) or “plants” (are already botanicals)

✅Increase specificity at every opportunity.

Use words that carry the role/context of the stuff you want to see.
Words with more “baggage” do more work for you.
Use archetypes or stock characters. 🌐Archetype - Wikipedia
Learn more on Discord: https://discord.com/channels/662267976984297473/1024347588792684584 

• wearing glasses and carrying an apple ➡️ a schoolteacher
• wearing a yellow hat with a light ➡️ a fireman (or a miner?)
• riding a bicycle ➡️ a cyclist
• on a horse ➡️ a rider
• wearing a wedding dress ➡️ a bride
• short hair and boy’s clothing ➡️ a tomboy
• holding a top hat and magic wand ➡️ a magician
• having a glass of wine and talking to other people ➡️ mingling
• sitting at a table with a pile of poker chips holding cards ➡️ playing poker
• around a table with a pink cake and balloons ➡️ birthday party

3. Prompts may need multiple chances to express themselves.

4. 🍰 Quality sometimes matters.

When the --quality command is available, you might consider using higher values. When you use higher values of quality, you’re giving Midge permission to “bake” things for a longer time in the GPU oven. It's spending your GPU minutes. The more GPU minutes you spend, the better the output's quality. Not aesthetic quality, but technical quality. If the best your prompt can produce is incoherent garbage, you'll get to see that incoherent garbage at its highest technical quality.😆

Learn more on Discord: https://discord.com/channels/662267976984297473/1029192765176823849 

5. Punctuation does matter, but kind of, but no, but yes, but no.

HEY! Just use punctuation in Midjourney the way you learned in school. Ok, that said, when troubleshooting or resolving issues, the following information may be useful.

• Only three punctuation types have any programmatic effect.

• Double-hyphens delimit parameters. -- aspect 9:16
• Double-Colons delimit integers (positive and negative) for weights. ::-0.5
• Spaces are used as the de facto noise to separate tokens, so are in effect special noise.

•  Literally all other punctuation adds nothing more than intriguing noise.

• All punctuation adds what we will call “intriguing noise.” 
• Sometimes, comma-noise and hyphen-noise can be helpful noise.

• Correct use of commas is recommended to help grouping, just like it does in ordinary writing.

• “Ornate shadowed massive sentient”➡️ “Ornate, shadowed, massive, sentient”

• Sometimes, when troubleshooting, hyphenation may increase the relationship between tokens.

•  “Antique brass candlestick” ➡️ “Brass-antique-candlestick”

6. You can use weights (double-colons) to create some special effects.

Hi. In this section, I show you how to mess around with scenes and themes,  but only because using weights to create themes and scenes is a fun way to learn weights.

🤖Create Themes

1. Find theme words that interest you, like: friendship, fear, safety, hope, war, romance, destruction, heroism, silence, heartbreak, vanity, youth, futurism, robotics, space opera, mystery, etc.
2. Introduce your prompt with the theme and weight it according to how much you want to see the theme saturate the rest of your vision (suggested values are 1-3), then write your prompt as usual.
3. The theme will pervade the prompt. Try this prompt as an example, then make your own.

Sentience::3 This is a picture of a chaotic mess of external wiring and plumbing on the walls of a brutalist architecture building in a busy city evening atmosphere. The colors are mainly midnight-blue and oak-brown. --ar 5:9

🌲🌳Create Settings/Scenes/Backgrounds

1. Envision a background or setting and describe it in 3-5 words, like: “midnight forest clearing” or “cliff overlooking the ocean”.
2. Introduce your prompt with the description and weight it to help it compete with the rest of your prompt (suggested values are 1-3).
3. It will act like a “stage”  upon which the rest of your prompt is presented. Try these prompts as examples, then make your own.

Twilight, vintage coffee house::1.5 Hipster female with blue eyes and long flowing brown hair poses wearing a floral tank and jeans, photorealistic edge-to-edge print in the style of Joe Ranft, Tom Ruegger, John Canemaker, Atelier Lulua --ar 5:7

Rainy forgotten jungle ruins::  Two elderly male explorers argue about credit cards, monsoon atmosphere, photorealistic edge-to-edge print in the style of Joe Ranft, Tom Ruegger, John Canemaker, Atelier Lulua --ar 5:7

🌲🌳Create Emphasis

If you notice Midjourney appears to "ignore" parts of your prompt,  it's time to learn the slider method! This is when you create a promptlet out of an exact phrase (an exact phrase) in your main prompt, and give it a virtual "slider" 🎚️ you can adjust to increase/decrease influence.

1️⃣ First create and run a base prompt like this:

A green dog sleeps in a forest clearing, magical twilight atmosphere --ar 3:2

2️⃣ And then,  if you notice a detail is lost, pick it up exactly (exactly) as written from the main prompt and add a slider like this:

A green dog sleeps in a forest clearing, magical twilight atmosphere:: magical::0.3 --ar 3:2

 Note that the sliders are put on exact phrases from the main prompt. And the further down the prompt they are, the higher the slider is set to compensate for their later (weaker) position in the prompt.

⚠️ For sliders to work, you need a main prompt that is all ONE string/sentence/statement. It can't have weights already. If your main prompt already has weights in it, this method won't work.

Learn more on Discord: https://ptb.discord.com/channels/662267976984297473/1086302697789083758 

🧮Troubleshooting! Play with Negative Weights

Midjourney defines things in terms of their most dominant standard characteristics. Departures from the standard mean Midjourney doesn’t recognize it anymore. One method to invoke an object that breaks its archetype is to figure out what tokens allow for it.  For example, you can’t get “a woman with green skin” but you can get “a green-skinned female humanoid” because, to Midjourney, “a woman” can not have green skin per the archetype for humans, but a humanoid can have green skin per the archetype for non-humans.

Another excellent way to break out of archetypes is to use negative weights.You may need to use negative weights to fight stereotypes. For example, if you’re struggling to give something a “non-standard” feature you can try giving a negative weight to the feature you DON’T want to see.

In this example below, we want to give a cat a non-standard third eye. We give Midge permission to add a third eye by replacing the “cat” archetype with “felinoid” and steered Midge away from two eyes by giving “two eyes” a negative weight. Experiment with stuff like this to learn how it can help you.

third-eye, felinoid::1 two eyes::-0.3

Learn more on Discord: https://discord.com/channels/662267976984297473/1020578042285920327 

7.  Use sentence-like fragments, not word lists.

In --v 5, write in sentence-like fragments, not word lists. “A young woman walks across campus” will work better than “woman, young, walking, campus”.

8. Style your art, make it your own.

In --v 5, to generate something other than a photographic image, you will need to reference art movements, artistic techniques, genres, media type, game titles, directors, artist names, influences, time periods, etc.

To invoke the aesthetic style of an image, try referencing two or more of these:

• Art movement: Identifying the art movement in the prompt will introduce its style and techniques. Examples include Impressionism, Surrealism, or Pop Art.
• Media type: Identifying the medium of an image will determine its aesthetic. Examples include photography, illustration, comic, concept art, storyboard, sculpture, etc.
• Media title: - Identifying a media influence will influence its look. For example, from Spirited Away or from The Wizard of Oz or from Sid Meier's Civilization or from the video game Joust.
• Artist name: Referencing the name or the work of a specific artist will roughly invoke their unique style. Examples include Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, or Banksy.
• Technique: Referencing techniques will add that style to the image. Examples include impasto, pencil sketch, watercolor, or digital art.
• Time period: Identifying the historical context of an image will invoke its aesthetic. For example, images from the Renaissance, Baroque, or Modernist periods.
• Geographic location: Referencing regions and countries will influence style. Examples include Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, African tribal art, or American Abstract Expressionism.

Learn more on Discord:

9. Aspect Ratio
   https://discord.com/channels/662267976984297473/1020581775447171132 
10. Stylize, Quality, Chaos, Etc.
    https://discord.com/channels/662267976984297473/1020577470795235358 

My name is @whatnostop (clarinet)  on the Midjourney official Discord server and I work for Midjourney. 🤓

We offer 24/7 community support and 100+ FAQs and tutorials for promptcraft, free with your membership.

Search by keyword on Discord #prompt-faqs or #prompt-chat forums for more help:
https://discord.com/channels/662267976984297473/1017917091606712430 

Last updated by @whatnostop (clarinet) 6:00 PM CST 10/25/2023

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https://www.midjourney.com/app/users/219587894862413824/ 😍