Midjourney - back to basics • 6 • Refine
Beginner’s Guide • Refining prompts for more precise results by learning to eliminate words.
There is an old programming mantra that I actually experienced an elementary school assembly on - Garbage In = Garbage Out (GIGO). It had a whole song and dance number in the program, but at that point in life - even with a dad who was a programmer - the value I saw in computers was making it successfully across the Oregon Trail without someone dying from Dysentery, or earning all the points in Sierra’s King’s Quest. GIGO as an idea managed to embed itself in my brain.
In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is the concept that flawed, biased or poor quality (“garbage”) information or input produces a result or output of similar (“garbage”) quality. - Wikipedia
GIGO? I know you are not actively thinking - “I want to prompt Midjourney using the most GARBAGE description.” But reference back to the quote I shared from my Art Instructor in college:
“When creating an illustration, everything in the painting needs to help tell the story. Anything that does not further the story along, is distracting.”
Rather, our thinking should be to remove the non-useful elements, the distractions. On the heels of a chapter called describe, our purpose then is to avoid being superfluous with our word count and usage.
superfluous - unnecessary, especially through being more than enough.
As my friend Roy Flynn states -
clear vision = clear output
I like that. We want clarity in both the vision of our final output and in the words used to describe that vision. Nothing superfluous. When working with Midjourney, we have a limit to word count. Not so much how many words YOU can use, but rather - how many words Midjourney will choose to focus on, and what weight it will apply on the words chosen. This is known as tokenization.
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