Midjourney Version 5.1: Back to Basics
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Midjourney Version 5.1: Back to Basics
The new "opinionated" Midjourney Version 5.1 combines Version 4's ease of use with Version 5's higher image quality. AI art beginners, rejoice!
When Midjourney Version 5 first came out in mid-March, the team was clear that it was a raw version without any “secret sauce” sprinkled in.
They called it “unopinionated.”
Well, Version 5.1. is here, and can you bet it’s got a few opinions!
Here’s the official launch summary from Midjourney CEO David Holz:
To boil all of this down to two main points, we can expect V5.1 to:
Return higher quality images in general
Make even basic prompts look pretty
Below are a few preliminary observations from my limited testing.
📸V5 = best for photos 🎨V5.1 = best for art
Right off the bat, it’s obvious that while V5 skews photographic, V5.1 is a lot more artsy. (Just like V4 was.)
Here’s a “man riding a horse”:
All four V5 results are photos. The V5.1 grid has a more painterly feel.
But it’s more than just “photo” vs. “painting.” The other aspect is…
😐V5 = bland 👹V5.1 = dramatic
Put simply, V5 usually does the bare minimum to fulfill your requirements, while V5.1. has a flair for the dramatic.
Ask them for “modern warfare,” and you get:
It’s hard to argue that V5 photos don’t live up to the “modern warfare” spec. They do. But most of them feel almost like sterilized stock images.
With V5.1, stuff. Is. Happening!
You want explosions? We’ve got explosions!
Want fire? Let’s burn it all down!
Need a helicopter? Here are at least, like, three of them!
So if you’re looking to tell a story and breathe life into images, V5.1 is your friend.
🪄 Vague / abstract prompts are best with V5.1
The intrinsic drama and artistic touch of V5.1 makes it more entertaining to use with random or less specific prompts.
Back in V4 days, I used to love using song titles as prompts or experimenting with different emoji combinations.
With V5, some of that magic is gone. Emoji combo like 🌈🐷will just give you this:
But do the same in V5.1 and boy, now we’re talking:
This even goes for completely mundane terms.
I accidentally asked Midjourney to imagine the word “settings” instead of using the /settings command (true story), and V5 gave me this:
I then used “settings” in V5.1 and got a whole bag of fantastic stuff:
In short, Midjourney V5.1 is simply more fun if you’re not looking for precision.
📝 Prompt accuracy: Inconclusive
I wasn’t quite sure what David Holz meant by “more accuracy to text prompts,” but I wanted to test it out. My hypothesis was that MJ V5.1 might be better at composing scenes with multiple different subjects.
So I tested this out with “one red ball and two green cubes on a blue table”:
I can’t award any clear points to V5.1 here. If anything, Version 5 is actually better in at least rendering both the “red ball” and the “blue table” more consistently.
Let’s try something else, like “kids jumping on a trampoline made of marshmallows”:
No obvious winner here, either.
V5.1 renders marshmallows more accurately, but V5 respects both the “kids” and “trampoline” terms in every picture.
Maybe I’m testing for the wrong thing?
As it stands, I’d have to give a slight edge to V5 for better following directions.
Use the right version for the right purpose
One thing we can conclude quite definitively: In the absence of specific prompt descriptors, V5.1 is more artistic than raw V5.
I think it’s great to have two tools that can be used for different things.
Midjourney V5 is perfect for photo prompts, creating realistic stock images, or situations where you need a high degree of control over the end result.
Midjourney V5.1 is great for art, fantasy concepts, storytelling, or just having some good old fashioned fun with less predictable but awesome-looking results.
To drive the above point home, I’ve added V5.1 to my V1-V5 comparison for the terms “forest hut,” “hamster photo,” and “hoverboard”:
There’s just more life in the V5.1 images, isn’t there?
How to enable Version 5.1
You’ve already done it!
Yup, if you’re reading this after May 4, 2023, Version 5.1 is now the default mode:
If you’ve previously set up another version via /settings, you can switch to V5.1 using the same process:
Have fun and enjoy those epic scenes!
Over to you…
Did you do more to test the “text accuracy” claim? Have you found version 5.1 to be better at interpreting input than V5? I’d love to see some examples!
Feel free to share any other general observations about Midjourney V 5.1. You can leave a comment on the site or shoot me an email (reply to this one).
Midjourney Version 5.1: Back to Basics
Wow, that rainbow pig example is wild. Somehow it never occurred to me to use emojis in my prompts.
Great writeup!
I've been having success using Midjourney Version 5.1 with the new "Raw" setting when I'm going for photo-realism. My initial - very unscientific - tests suggest that the images seem to be slightly better than with 5.0 while not being overly stylised.