Dec 20, 2024 3 min read midjourney

Moodboards - Adding "Grit"

Adding a dash of grit to my default style with a new Midjourney moodboard.

After playing with Midjourney's new moodboards for several thousand images across a handful of moodboards and a few new profiles, something finally clicked for me. Combining very different styles -- say, "gritty street photography" on the one hand, and my old-school default profile (which tends to create hyper-realistic, very pretty images), created sort of a synergistic mix that got me new kinds of images that 1) I like, and 2) I would not have gotten before.

Here's the story, told in a few thumbnails. This doesn't capture all the feels from an hour of generating a thousand-plus images in conjunction with one particular moodboard, but hopefully it captures a little.

First up, here are 16 photos and 2 Midjourney-generated images chosen from my Google Photos after a search for "saturated photographs".

Thumbnails of 18 photographic images in a 5x4 grid on black. Images include shoes, buildings, sunflowers, and more. They're bright and sort of abstract.

Some of them are as-shot, some have added Google filtering to make them pop. I chose these to have a lot of saturated color and photographic detail, hoping that would give me something interesting. I didn't choose them for compositional excellence, as you can probably tell. :-)

I dumped the images into a new moodboard called "Saturated Photos #1".

Then with a quick prompt of "street photography", I got these from Midjourney:

Thumbnails of four photographic images in a 2x2 grid on black. Sort of casual snapshots, not very artful. There's a red bench in a messy hallway, a schlumpy man walking down a sidewalk from the back, a man sitting on the porch outside a rough-looking house, and a woman in an unfinished room, looking at the camera, wearing something like period theater clothes.

These synthetic photos are the "pretty" ones; some others were really ugly, so ugly I had to hide them. (I can get squeamish with images.) They're not necessarily great images, but they do have a lot of style and detail.

I have to say, after seeing these, I changed the name of the moodboard to "Gritty, Saturated Photography". The generated images had more grit than I expected. :-)

So, I started blending some of these "gritty" images with my default profile, mostly by using the gritty synth photos as style refs, and rendering with my default profile. (I think I experimented with a couple different ways of mixing, but that's the gist.)

These were sort of half-way between gritty and pretty.

Thumbnails of three photographic images in a 2x2 grid on black. A man at the seaside picking up a white human skull, a statue of a woman in what looks like a rural area near the coast, she's wearing a red dress, and a street photo of two non-descript bearded men.

A few more rounds of mixing, and I was getting images back in my default style, but with some extra pizazz that I hadn't been getting before the moodboard experiment.

Thumbnails of four AI-generated images in a 2x2 grid on black. A shiny, multicolored statue of a puffy cartoon man; a fanciful, colorful bird; a cool guy with sunglasses and a bushy beard, in a pink patchwork cap and felt jacket, with orange pants; a fantasy bird king who is wearing some clothes and sitting as if he were human.

Success!

There's a lot more to do with moodboards and different profiles, of course. It's an exciting time to be a Midjourney user!

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