Midjourney has revealed its Version 4, or --v 4, in prompts. Long story short: it's BIG.

I've run a series of lab tests trying to reveal a tiny fraction of how it sees the world. Here are the results of my research.

[pictures are clickable]

The --v 4 blows your mind. It exceeded my expectations almost every single time. It knows what's "beautiful" for humans and sends it back to us tenfold. It has excellent attention to detail and knows composition perfectly.

And—it seems to become a feature for Midjourney—even when the results are off or glitch-y, they are off beautifully. I encourage you to experiment!

As a portrait photographer, I am overly fascinated by the limits of Image Prompts. I was very impressed by it in V3, but Version 4 takes Image Prompts to the moon. Thus they will be my focus today.

Meet Francis, a friend whom I photographed in Paris some years ago.

And that's what happened when I first "fed" that portrait to --v 3.

Sidenote: Francis taught me another important lesson: the more pronounced a person's features are, the better Midjourney "captures" and "reinterprets" them. Bottom line: choose subjects with strong, pronounced characters, and images with clearly visible and well lit features. Also, Francis is ideal for our test.

Today, I asked --v 4 to reimagine the portrait of Francis with a simple addition as someone. And here are the results:

As you can see, V4 is crazy good here. It truly catches the character and carefully transitions the style. And it seems to successfully put together even the craziest combinations! (see below)

Even though V4 knows most artists' styles from my experiments, some confuse AI. In some cases, it seems to only apply a part of the style: like light, color, and composition, but not the actual brushstrokes; or use the artist's style as a backdrop or even some scene elements.

I then tried some of my other portrait work, including more detailed, wide-frame scenes.

I see a lot of people use Midjourney for previsualization in their photographic projects. I think its a very cool idea! In my days *coughs* we used Photoshop to put digital collages together, and some more intricate ones could consume hours to prepare. Let's feed one of those old-school collages to Midjourney and compare the result with text-only prompt generation.

And that wasn't enough, here comes the ground-breaking part. You can "feed" Midjourney two images and see how it magically blends them together. Yes, you could do it in --v 3, too. But V4 takes it to a whole new level.

To see how it works, I took a few iconic movie scenes and asked Midjourney to mix them with the portrait of Francis.

Of course, I tried blending Francis' portrait with some other images from both photographs and even Midjourney generations.

Bonus track: try sending Midjourney its own generations, changing artist's style on each step.

Mind. Blown. Thank you, Midjourney!

-- Yours, Andrei