The Beginner’s Guide to Writing Midjourney Prompts
Contents
With a gallery of stunning visuals, a user-friendly interface, and an enthusiastic community, Midjourney is making a name for itself as a go-to AI visual generation tool for content creators and businesses alike. Like many of its peers, AI generation platforms are becoming better by the day, offering more features and accessibility to end users.
But while these models are quickly improving, what doesn’t change is the need to write clear, specific prompts that accurately describe your desired output. Great prompts matter because:
- They yield better results. An effective prompt helps the tool deliver something accurate, relevant, and useful rather than waste renders in a completely different direction.
- They conserve resources. An effective prompt saves time and money by helping you reach your desired output in fewer tries. Aside from being beneficial for your business, this reduces AI energy consumption on a broader scale.
Given how much a well-written prompt impacts your output quality and resource consumption, learning how to craft effective instructions for Midjourney is certainly worth learning. Whether you’re trying the tool out for the first time or regularly use it in your creative workflows, ensuring your prompts are solid will help you reach your goals.
This guide will give you a crash course to writing Midjourney prompts: the basics, followed by a few advanced techniques that will help you fine-tune your results.
Let’s dive in!
What is Midjourney?
Midjourney is an AI visual generation tool known for producing artistic, conceptual, and stylistic visuals. Created by an independent research lab, the close-source AI model ensures custom algorithms and training data is completely within control of the company.
With humble beginnings as a Discord bot, Midjourney has come a long way and now has a beautiful web interface that allows end users to generate visuals more easily than ever before—and this isn’t limited to images. Users can also create short videos that look like animated paintings or concept art, with dramatic lighting, rich textures, and a surreal or cinematic feel.
What is a Prompt?
The image or video generation instructions provided to Midjourney are referred to as “prompts”. They might be a couple of words or longer descriptive strings, and include parameters and other settings.
While the general format of a prompt may be similar across AI generation platforms, Midjourney has its own nuances. Understanding how to frame your desired output specifically for this platform’s context is key to maximizing results.
The Basics of Writing Prompts
All AI prompts are essentially instructions provided to elicit your desired results. However, different AI models may respond better to specific formats, and knowing how to prompt engineer for the model you’re working with will significantly improve results.
Midjourney prompts should clearly describe what you want your image or video to look like. Something short, simple, and specific will yield the best results. You can include specific elements if they are important to the final image, such as the subject, medium, color, and composition.
Your prompt can be detailed, with instructions specifying exactly the elements you want in your output. It can also be just a word or simple phrase, leaving the AI model to fill in the blanks. It’s all up to you and your goals.
Quick Tips
Writing a basic prompt isn’t complicated, but knowing the best way to frame your vision can enhance the quality of your results. Get started with these quick tips:
- Be specific. Instead of vague words like “small”, use specific descriptors like “tiny” or “minuscule” to give the model enough context to work with.
- Use the No parameter instead of specifying what you don’t want. The AI model works better with prompts that describe what you do want rather than what you don’t. Use the
noparameter for exclusions instead. - Leave room when you can allow it. Decide what elements matter to you and allow the model to fill in the rest of the gaps. This will often give you more variety in your results and avoid confusing the process.
- Choose conceptual words. One of Midjourney’s strengths is stunning stylistic and conceptual work, so including words that describe the medium, time period, emotion, colors, and environment can yield interesting results.
There’s lots of room to edit, enhance, and build on one of your generated images, so you don’t need to get it right the first time. Your first prompt is just a building block to start off from!
Prompt Examples & Output
Even slight differences in your prompts can yield vastly different results. Let’s test out a few examples of prompts involving cats and boats, and compare the results.
Example 1 - A Detailed Prompt
Prompt💡: “pastel sculpture of three cats on a tugboat”
This prompt provided instructions as to the style, quantity, and subject of the image. It yielded fairly similar output, with some style variations. Each image included three pastel cats facing in the same direction, placed on blue tugboats of similar shapes.
Example 2 - A Simple Prompt
Prompt 💡: “cats on a boat”
This prompt was simple and straight to the point, describing the subject and location of the image. It yielded output with different numbers of cats, styles of art, and varying moods. The model seemed to lean towards darker, gloomier colors and woodblock elements, but otherwise, there was a fair amount of variety.
Example 3 - An Even Simpler Prompt
Prompt 💡: “cat boat”
This prompt was simple, only including two elements to be included. This resulted in a much greater variation in results—different styles, quantities, colors, and moods.
Advanced Techniques
Ready to go beyond the basics? There are several advanced techniques you can leverage to take your Midjourney prompts to the next level. Let's dive into some of the most powerful options.
Using Parameters
Parameters provide Midjourney with more specific instructions during the generation process. They can be used to specify aspect ratios, refer to certain style references, and switch between model versions, among other things.
Midjourney has a generous list of parameters that provide more control over your generation process, as follows:
| Type | Definition | Parameter |
|---|---|---|
| Aspect Ratio | Midjourney images start as squares, but you can change this using the aspect ratio parameter | –aspect or –ar |
| Chaos | Spice up your image results with the chaos parameter | –chaos or –c |
| Omni Reference | Want to use a person's likeness or the form of an object? You can provide Midjourney with an Omni Reference! (replaces Character Reference in V7) | –oref |
| No | Tell Midjourney what you don't want in your image using the no parameter | –no |
| Personalization | Create custom image styles with personalized profiles and moodboards | –profile or –p |
| Quality | Control the detail and processing time of your images with the quality parameter | –quality or –q |
| Repeat | Want to generate multiple image sets from a single prompt? Use the repeat parameter | –repeat or –r |
| Seed | Use the seed parameter for testing and experimenting | –seed |
| Stealth Mode | Unpublish your image creations on the Midjourney website | –stealth |
| Raw Mode | Gain more control over your images with Raw Mode | –raw |
| Stylize | Control the artistic flair in your images with the stylize parameter | –stylize or –s |
| Style Reference | Want to match the look and feel of another image? You can provide Midjourney with a Style Reference! | –sref |
| Tile | Create seamless repeating patterns with the tile parameter | –tile |
| Version | Explore and switch between Midjourney's model versions using the version parameter | –version or –v |
| Draft | Generate draft images in V7 at half the GPU cost | –draft |
| Weird | Make your images quirky and unconventional with the weird parameter | –weird or –w |
| Fast Mode | Switch your GPU speed to Fast Mode | –fast |
| Image Weight | Control the impact of image prompts | –iw |
| Relax Mode | Switch your GPU speed to Relax Mode | –relax |
| Turbo Mode | Switch your GPU speed to Turbo Mode | –turbo |
| Niji | Use our model focused on anime and Eastern aesthetics | –niji |
| Public Mode | Publish your image creations on the Midjourney website | –public |
| Motion Low/High | Adjust motion settings for video generations | –motion low and –motion high |
| Video Looping & End Frames | Create looping video generations | –loop and –end |
| Batch Size | Control the number of videos generated from each video prompt | –bs |
| Style Weight | Control the strength of your Style References | –sw |
| Style Reference Versions | Select your style reference version | –sv |
| Video | Generate videos in Discord | –video |
Place parameters at the end of your prompt text, ensuring proper spacing and formatting.
🐱 Examples :
cats on a boat --ar 9:16
massive ocean waves --tile
origami crane --ar 16:9 --weird 1500
Using these parameters in your prompts can lead to more precise, tailored results that align exactly with your creative vision. Experiment with different combinations to see how they impact your output.
Creating Profiles & Moodboards
Another advanced technique is to create custom profiles and moodboards to inform your prompts. Profiles help the AI understand what you find more aesthetically pleasing. You can unlock them by going through a series of prompts where you choose which image you like better.
Moodboards, on the other hand, are collections of visual references that you can use to produce output of a similar look and feel. Before generating an image, assemble a moodboard of inspirational artwork, photography, or illustrations that captures the mood, colors, and overall vibe you want to achieve. You can then reference this moodboard directly in your prompt using parameters.
Both of these techniques take a bit of upfront work, but they can streamline your prompt-writing process and lead to more cohesive, consistent results. This makes a big difference if you're looking to produce a lot of work matching a certain branding or feel!
Iterating on Prompts
Finally, don't be afraid to iterate on your prompts. The first draft is rarely perfect, so experiment, tweak, and refine your instructions until you land on something that delivers the desired output.
Midjourney has creation and animation actions you can easily access directly based on the output of your previous prompt.
Besides small adjustments to refine your output, try modifying individual elements of your prompt—swap out descriptors, adjust the parameters, or change the ordering of the text.
The more you practice and iterate, the better you'll become at crafting prompts that speak the language of Midjourney’s AI model. With each new image you create, you'll gain a deeper understanding of what works and what doesn't, allowing you to continuously improve your process.
Conclusion
Mastering the art of writing effective Midjourney prompts takes time and practice, but the payoff is well worth it. By understanding the key elements, leveraging advanced techniques, and continuously iterating on your prompts, you can unlock the full potential of this powerful AI generation tool. With patience and persistence, you'll be producing stunning, stylistic visuals that captivate your audience in no time.
Want to learn more about Midjourney? Here are some great articles to get you started:
👉 5 Best Midjourney Alternatives for Generating AI Videos in 2025
👉 Top 6 Image-to-Video AI Generators in 2025: A Side-by-Side Comparison
