The Technical Part

OK, Now comes the technical part. I will try to explain how Midjourney prompts work. And some useful commands.

I hate the name prompt engineer

First, i need to clarify that I hate the name "Prompt Engineer". As a "Software Engineer", I think the name engineer requires a lot of knowledge and experience. But the prompt engineer is just a person who type the prompt. There is nothing so special about it. And I think it is a little bit misleading. After all, we are not calling the person who type the article "Type Engineer", we are not calling the person who talk the "talk engineer". It is just a way of giving computer command(And that command is not even close to programming). And I believe after you have read this article, you will learn the trick.

The anatomy of prompt: command

So , once you treat the prompt as a command, you will find that it is not that hard to understand.
It is not some magic words. Let's dive into it:

In my previous article, when you type a prompt, you start with the command /imagine.
And then you type the prompt.
But in fact, there is more command that you can start with. Let me show you:

For example, I find the /help command to be extremely useful. It will show you all the commands that you can use. And it will give you link to the full command list as well as the doc.

And what is more exciting about the command is you can use /ask command. So you can actually ask the bot a question. And it will try it best to answer you or take you to some thread that may answer your question. It is a great way to learn about it.(I learned a lot myself this way)

Let me show you:

I asked the bot how to write prompt, it linked me to the doc as well as some QnA thread about the long mystical word order. (I will talk about it later).

And the other prompt that I find useful are /info /fast '/describe' '/blend' 'private'. You can look the doc and try it out yourself.(Some of command may require you to subscribe to midjourney)

The anatomy of prompt: Character Ref Example

One of the most use case (at least for me) for a digital artist is to use mid journey to quickly generate character sheet to help me to draw. So I will show you how to do it.

I use the command:

manga stype, short hair teenager girl style sheet, range of poses, six views --ar 2:1

And got the results like this:

I think the 4th one is very interesting. So I scale it:

Remember, when you upscale it, it does not just end there, you can do so much more.

So in the next article, I will show you how to what you can do after you have scale it. How to make more variation and fine tuning the result.