Midjourney image/video creation tool

In My Humble Opinion
61

I decided to sign up for a premium google AI account so I have access to some of the advanced tools like flow. Flow actually has a 2x 4x option when you generate images and videos, like midjourney, where you can crank out 4 variations on a prompt in one go. Which I thought would be great. But it has none of the midjourney deliberate variation. It basically always creates the same “idea” of an image with 4 subtle variations. In practice, it’s like creating one image and then running 3 “vary subtle” passes on the 3 other images. Which… is almost useless. Midjourney will give you 4 genuinely different takes on the same prompt. Flow gives you one take, and then says “but what if this guy had a beard” or “what if the camera was 5 feet to the left” or “what if the building on the right was a different architectural style” - it’s not not a substantially different take on the idea at all.

I’m a little surprised that no one has tried to copy the midjourney creative workflow because it’s genuinely different and novel compared to all the other image generators. It’s sort of a journey of artistic discovery, curation, iteration… and none of the other AI systems I’ve used so far even come close in that regard.

But… on the negative side… midjourney’s “trash” function is obnoxious and I hate it. You can “trash” an image but it doesn’t do anything significant. It doesn’t delete it or mark it for later deletion. It doesn’t hide it. It dims it in the create view, but it still takes up space. you still have to scroll past it.

It does hide it by default in the organize view, which is good… but I spend most of my time in the create view, and I end up having to scroll through lots of images that I’d rather have hidden or deleted. I can’t understand their UI logic there.

62

Midjourney’s UI was sort of retrofit around the bot. Originally, they just had the Discord bot and the only thing you could do on the website was view images, vote and see the Hot/New feeds. There was no image creation, editing, etc available via the website. Since then, they’ve been trying to maker the website the main portal with mixed results in part because they ALSO still have it pinned to the main Discord bot function and the inability to remove something from Create is probably tied to that.

On Discord, assuming you’re using the bot in a channel and not in private DMs, anyone else with an account can take your results and click to make variants, upscales, outpainting, etc. So they can’t really fully eliminate anything you created because it might be tied to someone else’s creation. They can remove it from your image catalog and hide it from view for others to see/manipulate but they won’t remove it fully from the system. With the prior website and Discord reliance this didn’t matter but it looks like its web UI implementation is clunkier.

I almost exclusively use Discord via DMs with the bot or in a channel I have with friends so I’d never noticed.

63

(n/m, made a mistake)

64

(Hey, sorry again about yesterday. I hope you don’t mind me chiming in about this unrelated topic, but if you’d rather I butt out altogether, just let me know… no hard feelings.)

If you trash all 4 images of a set (or trash the entire row by hovering over the text prompt section), that entire set will go away.

With an ad blocker, you could individually hide trashed images within a set, but that wouldn’t really do much good since the rest of the row would still be there and taking up vertical scroll space =/

Silly UI indeed.

65

Not at all. I appreciate you. you’ve brought interesting things to the discussion. we had one misunderstanding and you gave everything a sincere re-read and I appreciate that. Everything is good.

You know what, you’re right. It’s load-bearing. Even if you delete 3 of the 4 images of a set, the last image of that set needs vertical space to work in the create tab - it still needs to “hold” the prompt and tool that created it. So… you’re not actually saving vertical space by deleting three. But if you delete all four, they disappear. That actually makes a lot more sense.

66

I discovered an interesting parameter. --stop. it no longer works with v7, so you have to use v6 to use it. It stops the diffusion process somewhere in the middle - whatever percentage you specify. So it’s like pulling a half-cooked dinner out of the oven. It’s probably not useful, exactly, but if you want to see how diffusion generators work (and they’re weird), it’s a fun experiment.

Here’s a --stop 35 -v 6 portrait for example. It’s already starting to take its shape but it’s only halfway there. --stop 20 produces haunting, inhuman results that are vaguely human shaped enough that they’re a bit disturbing. – stop 10 (the minimum it allows) will basically produce noise with perhaps the start of a colored blob where the subject will eventually be. a very vague shape. --stop 80 is most of the way there - but without the final stages of polishing, so they look sort of rough in an interesting way.

If I was the art director on a low budget horror movie I might use stop 10 to 20 as a way of generating free creepy images. Put them on a flickering tv, or perhaps paintings on the wall in a dark room you can only partially see and they’re genuinely disturbing.

67

Heh, yea. The handsome Florida character could go around asking righteous questions… at the point of a fist.

Answer correctly: rock on devil horns gesture.
Wrong? Half-Wolverine blade.

“Do you like AC/DC?”
“Uhm, sure.”
shhling “AC/DC SUCKS!”
“I mean, their old stuff…”
blades fade, howls with tattooed wolf

68

I’m 3 days from the end of my first month and I realize how stingy I’ve been with my GPU time - I still have 10 of my 15 hours left. Because I’ve mostly generated images on low priority / queued mode, which is free (for paid users, I mean it doesn’t eat your GPU time). I was being too cautious and I guess I could’ve generated a lot more images quickly or done a lot more videos.

I suppose with 3 days left and no roll over I might as well go wild trying the animation system. Anyone have anything they’d want to test to see how well it does it?

69

I’ve been messing around with Kling for a few months. It seems reputable and reliable enough and there are plenty of YouTube creators posting reviews and instructional videos. It seems ok.

I like Kling because I can just buy tokens for creating stuff when I want without having to commit to a subscription.

70

Make it try to visualize the latent space, especially around different forms of the word “fill” / “filled”

71

Okay, I just used the omni prompt tonight for the first time and it’s INCREDIBLE. It preserves your characters incredibly well. You can take them from scene to scene.

I created this character tonight who I absolutely loved - a retro glamorous 50s movie starlet

And I decided to try out the omni reference to experiment with her.

There’s an “omni weight” variable between 0-1000 which basically means… how much of the character’s vibes are you bringing to the scene? 400+ and the character becomes the dominant factor of the scene. She’s well preserved, but her aesthetics bleed into the rest of the scene too. Whereas with something like 50 omni weight, it will try to balance between preserving the character but integrating her into the scene better. It’s whether she completely dominates the scene or participates in it.

Prompt: “A woman at a beach” with the image I posted above as the omni reference. Omni weight 400. Result:

The omni weight 400 gave her aesthetic a strong pull. It strongly replicated her character and it even replicated the vibe - the image I’m getting her from has strong red vibes and so she comes with strong red vibes. So instead of showing me a clear day at the beach - where the red vibes can’t work - they put it in a fire lit night scene at a beach club, where the red-dominant aesthetic can work. Very clever.

Prompt: A space ship captain. Omni weight 350

At 350 her vibe is still completely dominated the scene. the space ship is red, and more notably, the spaceship has fireplaces. Or fires burning in the background for whatever reason. Because the source image has her near a fireplace, it’s part of her aesthetic. She’s dominating this scene even though it’s plausibly a space ship.

“high school teacher in front of the class” - OW 75

75 weight starts to strike a balance. There’s some red in this scene but she’s not dominating the scene in the same way. She still has recognizably the same face. But she lost the red dress, which has been up to now a canonical component in the character.

“A high school teacher in front of the class” - omni weight 25.

At 25, the scene dominates and she’s integrating into it, at the cost of her character. You can still see her face in there, but she’s lost her clothes, her look, the red, her hair.

Extremely interesting tool. I’m very excited to take some of the characters I’ve already generated and love into new places.