This is part of our beginner’s guide to using AI. Midjourney produces some of the most polished, artistic AI-generated imagery available, but its workflow is less obvious than a typical app, especially since it started inside Discord. Here’s the process from a blank account to a finished image.
Step 1: Create an account and pick a plan
Midjourney now offers both a web app and its original Discord-based workflow; the web app at midjourney.com is the simpler starting point for a first-time user, no Discord server navigation required. Midjourney doesn’t have an ongoing free tier, only a limited trial, so budget for a subscription if you plan to use it regularly beyond initial testing.
Step 2: Write your first prompt
Start simpler than you think you need to. A prompt like “a small wooden lighthouse on a rocky coast at sunset, watercolor style” gives Midjourney enough to work with: subject, setting, lighting, and style. Overloading a first prompt with ten qualifiers before seeing how the tool interprets a simpler version makes it harder to tell what’s actually driving the result.
Step 3: Review the four-image grid
Midjourney generates four variations per prompt by default. Look at them as four different interpretations of the same idea rather than expecting one to be exactly right: each will emphasize different elements of the prompt, and comparing them tells you which specific words are having the most influence on the output.
Step 4: Upscale or vary
Once you find a version you like, you can upscale it for a higher-resolution final image, or generate variations that keep the same general composition but explore small changes. This is the actual iteration loop that produces a genuinely good final image: rarely the first grid, usually the second or third round of variations on the best result from the first.
Step 5: Refine with specific modifiers
Once the basic composition works, small additions make the biggest remaining difference: an aspect ratio parameter for a specific format (square for social, wide for a banner), a stylization parameter to push the output more or less toward Midjourney’s default artistic interpretation, and a specific camera or lens reference if you’re aiming for photorealism. Midjourney’s own documentation maintains the current, exact syntax for these parameters, worth checking directly since specific commands do change between versions.
Common beginner mistakes
Writing an overly long, adjective-stacked prompt before understanding how Midjourney responds to a simpler one makes it hard to diagnose what’s working. Start simple, add one or two specific changes at a time, and you’ll learn the tool’s behavior far faster than starting complex.
Expecting exact text to render correctly inside a generated image is another common frustration; Midjourney, like most image generators, has historically struggled with legible in-image text. If specific readable text matters, plan to add it afterward in a design tool rather than expecting the generator to produce it directly.
Skipping the community and documentation resources is a mistake specific to Midjourney: its prompt syntax and available parameters are genuinely non-obvious compared to a simpler tool like DALL-E, and a few minutes with the official documentation saves a lot of trial and error.
Understanding negative prompts and weighting
Beyond describing what you want, Midjourney supports telling it what to avoid, useful for a persistent unwanted element that keeps appearing across generations. It also supports weighting specific words in a prompt more heavily than others, effectively saying “this part matters more than that part” within the same request, rather than treating every word as equally important. Both features add real precision once you’ve got the basics working, though neither is necessary to produce a good first result.
Working with reference images
Beyond a pure text prompt, Midjourney supports uploading a reference image to guide composition or style, useful when you have a specific visual you’re trying to approximate or build on rather than describing everything from scratch in words. This is often faster than trying to describe a complex composition entirely in text, particularly for anything with a specific layout or pose in mind.
Building a personal workflow
Once you’ve generated a handful of images and have a sense of how the tool responds to your specific prompting style, it’s worth saving prompts that worked well as a personal reference rather than starting from scratch each time. Many regular users keep a running document of prompt structures, style keywords, and parameter combinations that reliably produce results they like, which becomes a genuinely faster starting point than reconstructing a good prompt from memory every session.
Getting a specific style consistently
If you’re generating multiple images that need to look like they belong together, a consistent style reference or a saved prompt structure you reuse works better than describing the style fresh each time and hoping for consistency. Midjourney supports style reference parameters specifically for this; check current documentation for the exact syntax, since this has evolved across versions.
Related reading
Back to the beginner’s guide to using AI, our full directory of best AI image generators if Midjourney isn’t the right fit for your specific need, and our general guide to writing better prompts, many of the same specificity principles apply to image prompts too.
Frequently asked questions
Is Midjourney free to use?
No, not on an ongoing basis. It offers a limited trial for new accounts but requires a paid subscription for continued use, unlike some competitors that maintain a permanent free tier.
Can I use Midjourney images commercially?
Paid subscribers generally have commercial usage rights, but the exact terms have changed across Midjourney’s history and differ by plan tier. Check the current terms of service for your specific subscription before using an image commercially.
Why do my results look different from other people’s Midjourney images?
Midjourney updates its underlying model periodically, and each version has a somewhat different default aesthetic. If you’re trying to match a specific look you saw elsewhere, check which model version produced it, since older and newer versions can differ noticeably in style even with a similar prompt.
Can I edit a Midjourney image after generating it?
Midjourney includes some built-in editing features for adjusting a specific region of a generated image, but for detailed editing beyond that, most users export the result into a separate image editor. Treat Midjourney as generating the base image, with fine detail work happening in dedicated editing software afterward if needed.
