MidJourney Prompts For Ultra-Realistic Images
In this video, I want to talk about how to create ultra photorealistic images using Mid-Journey. This video is actually inspired by a Reddit thread that I came across a few days ago. This person created these images inside of Mid-Journey. Just take a look at these. Look at how absolutely realistic these are. If you didn’t look really, really close and you just saw these on Instagram, you’d probably think these were actual real photographs. Up until recently, I didn’t even realize that you can get this kind of quality out of Mid-Journey. I want to do some experimentation and see if we can get similar results out of Mid-Journey ourselves. Let’s go ahead and dive right in.
Now, this thread on Reddit was from user Archie7, and they were kind enough to actually share the prompt that they used. Now, in this thread, they talk about how this was actually the original prompt that they used to get these images. But then they started to remove some of the prompt keywords and ended up getting a shorter prompt to generate similar results, and that was this prompt. And then after even more experimentation, they got it down to an even shorter prompt here. So let’s go ahead and see what happens when we pull this into Mid-Journey ourselves.
Now, before I get into it, if you don’t already have a Mid-Journey account, pop on over to midjourney.com, come down here to join the beta, and you can actually generate up to 25 images for free inside of Mid-Journey. It does require that you do it in Discord, and then after 25 images, their most inexpensive plan is about 10 bucks a month. So let’s go ahead and grab this prompt here. We’ll go ahead and copy it, and let’s pull it into Mid-Journey ourselves and see what happens when we use the same prompt that they used in that Reddit thread.
So the prompt that they ended up using was ‘portrait of an Indian village woman in the forest in Himachal Pradesh’ (sorry if I butchered that), ‘clear facial features,’ ‘cinematic 35-millimeter lens,’ ‘F1.8,’ ‘accent lighting,’ ‘global illumination,’ and then they made sure ‘uplight’ and ‘version 4’ and ‘quality 2’ were all set. And here’s what I got when I generated that, and I mean, look at these. These are so realistic. I especially think number one and number four here are just insanely detailed. Like, you probably wouldn’t notice that these were generated with Mid-Journey if you just kind of scrolled past them on Instagram or something. Let’s go ahead and upscale number one and let’s go ahead and upscale number four. And look at these, these are just absolutely amazing.
Now, let’s go ahead and grab this same prompt, but let’s tweak it a little bit. Let’s type ‘imagine’ and we’ll paste this in. And instead of a portrait of an Indian village woman in a forest, let’s do a young American boy leaning against a brick wall, ‘clear facial features,’ ‘cinematic 35-millimeter lens,’ and let’s just leave everything else the same but just swap out an Indian village woman in a forest with a young American boy leaning against a brick wall and see what we get with that. And once again, we got some really, really detailed images. Now, in my opinion, these are a little less realistic. There’s something about them that almost looks like Unreal Engine video game characters, but they’re still pretty dang good.
Now, earlier today, as I was preparing to make this video, I actually came across this video from the ‘Maximize’ YouTube channel here, where he talks about how to create AI photos that look 100% real with Mid-Journey. I’ll make sure I link this below as well. There was one tip in this video that I came across that I thought was really, really cool. He showed that if you actually put ‘Polaroid’ in part of your prompt, it generates what you would traditionally think of as a Polaroid image and gives you these ultra-realistic images on a Polaroid. So this was something else I wanted to check out and test for myself as well. Let’s jump back into Mid-Journey here and let’s do ‘imagine a photograph of two girls celebrating at a birthday party’ and then let’s add ‘Polaroid.’ And this is essentially the same prompt he was using in this video. I just want to test to see if I get a similar result here. I’m not going to change the aspect ratio because a Polaroid is traditionally a square image. And look at these, these are so realistic. I mean, if you look really close, you could see some stuff that are dead giveaways that it’s AI, but who wears two party hats like that? I guess a kid’s birthday party you might wear two party hats like that, honestly. But they even made it so that the images look a little bit aged. So really, really cool effect.
Now, let’s go ahead and try this with a different prompt and see if it works outside of the original prompt we gave it. Let’s go ‘imagine a photograph of a dad in the 1970s leaning against his Corvette.’ That seems like something you might have a Polaroid of. And check that out, that looks like every dad from the 1970s leaning against his Corvette, every dad that you know tucks his arm into his jean shirt or has his arms meld into his hands. Alright, so there’s some perspective issues here, but you know, with a couple of re-rolls, I’m sure we could get some really cool images of exactly what we’re looking for.
Now, we already know that Mid-Journey can do ultra-realistic landscape photography, but using some of these camera details can really, really up level it. So let’s do ‘imagine a landscape photograph of snow-covered mountains behind a beautiful lake.’ Let’s add some details about the camera we’re using. Let’s use a 35-millimeter lens, F22 for the aperture, ‘cinematic,’ and let’s go ‘wide-angle lens.’ And then let’s go ahead and add our aspect ratio of 16:9 and let’s see what this generates for us.
Alright, so look at those. Now, if I sent you one of these photos and said, ‘I just took this on my recent trip to New Zealand,’ you probably wouldn’t question the authenticity of any of these. These are really realistic. Now, another really cool technique I wanted to share was when I came across from my friend Linus here. He shared his technique for National Geographic photography with Mid-Journey, and look at how realistic these lions are here. Look at how realistic this monkey is, and this cheetah, and these zebras. I mean, this imagery looks like something that a National Geographic photographer would have actually taken. And he, of course, shares his prompt up here. So here’s his formula: you put the animal, the shot direction, the pose, the time of day, you add National Geographic, and then your film type. For example, ‘lions from below side view golden hour National Geographic shot on Agra Vista aspect ratio 16:9.’ Let’s go ahead and test this prompt here, pull it into Mid-Journey, paste in the exact prompt that Linus shared. Look at these, these are all super realistic. I mean, it’s just crazy to me what you can do with Mid-Journey right now.
Now, let’s go ahead and grab this same prompt, but let’s change out some of the keywords. So, go ahead and copy this, we’ll paste it back in here. This time, let’s do ‘penguins.’ Let’s leave everything else, ‘from below side view golden hour National Geographic,’ but then let’s put ‘shot with telephoto lens,’ leave our aspect ratio at 16:9, and let’s see what that gives us. And once again, absolutely awesome. Some funkiness going on in this one up here, but I mean, like this one right here, I don’t think you would second guess if you saw this on the cover of a National Geographic. Same with this one up here, I think a lot of the magic in this one is in that golden hour prompt that gives it that sort of gold overlay look. And then, of course, using National Geographic to get that National Geographic photo style.
Now, let’s try something else here. I’m going to copy this same prompt, but let’s tweak it again. I’ll paste it in. Let’s do a ‘hippo.’ Let’s change this to ‘from above,’ let’s change this to ‘morning hour,’ and leave ‘shot with telephoto lens’ here. Adding the time of day and National Geographic and the type of lens that you’re using, that’s what gives these the power, and these just look awesome. This one down here is a little janky, but these other three all look just great. I mean, you can see that they look like somebody was maybe standing up on a hillside taking a shot down at a hippo, and you know, we’re not getting that same golden look like we did on the golden hour, we’re getting kind of a more blue, sort of cooler-toned image. So just absolutely amazing stuff, and you can just really get some crazy photo realism with Mid-Journey right now.
Now, there’s one last thing I want to try. I want to try to use a combo of Linus’s technique with some of the earlier techniques that we were messing with and see if we can get photos of people to look equally as realistic. Again, so let’s go ahead and type ‘imagine,’ but instead of ‘hippo,’ let’s do a ‘young boy on a street corner graffiti wall background,’ ‘from above side view morning hour National Geographic.’ Let’s go back to the shot on Agfa Vista, and let’s go ahead and put our aspect ratio at 16:9 and let’s see if we blend the sort of National Geographic and the time of day with an actual human. I wonder what that’s going to give us. Not too bad at all, especially this top right where their back is kind of facing us, this looks like it could be a real image. This one you could kind of tell by the face and the hand that it’s not that realistic, the wall itself looks ultra-realistic, this one I think looks kind of too much like a cartoon face, and this one I don’t know, there’s something off about it. But this one on the top right, really, really cool image.
Anyway, it just really blows me away what you can do with Mid-Journey right now. You can get some really crazy, amazing, realistic images out of it. Now, I’ll be sure to link all of these resources up below. Go check out Archie7’s thread here on Reddit about how they got these super realistic images out of Mid-Journey. Check out Linus’s thread about how he’s using the National Geographic prompt to get these crazy realistic animal images. Check out ‘Maximize’ YouTube channel, where he shares his formula for how he’s getting realistic images with Mid-Journey. There’s a lot of really cool stuff out there, and I’m just loving playing around with this stuff and figuring out how to get more and more realism out of Mid-Journey. Have you found any prompts that work really, really well? Share them in the comments. I want to test some more and make more videos about just amazing Mid-Journey prompts. And if you love nerding out about all this AI stuff as much as I do, make sure you check out futuretools.io. This is the site where I curate all of the cool AI tools that I come across.
I’m adding new tools every single day, and if it’s just a little bit too much for you and it’s a little overwhelming, click here to join the free newsletter. Every single Friday, I send just the five coolest AI tools that I come across. I also send a handful of YouTube videos, a handful of news articles, basically the TL;DR of all the coolest stuff that happened in the AI space over the week. You can find it all over at futuretools.io. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. I hope you enjoyed this video. I enjoyed making it. I love exploring Mid-Journey, and I’m going to keep on going deeper and testing the limits of what it’s capable of. Make sure you do like this video, press the little thumbs up button, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to the channel. It’ll make sure you see more videos just like it in your feed. Thanks so much for tuning in. See you guys in the next one. Bye!
