Midjourney: The complete guide to prompts and their components in the image creation process

Actually, there are other types of Midjourney prompts, besides those you use to generate images.

Midjourney prompting

Almost all Midjourney learning materials about prompts on the internet teach us how to write Midjourney prompts. Sure, prompt writing is an essential skill in Midjourney. It’s how we put our imagination into words and ask the bot to create the visual.

If you only use Midjourney on occasion, writing prompts to generate images is likely to suffice in more than 80% of cases. The remaining 20% is used for purposes other than image creation, such as image editing, aesthetic refinement, and so on. Don't ask me where I got that 80-20%. It's a rough estimate based on the Pareto Principle and personal experience.

This article provides an overview of the prompts' roles and components in Midjourney. You'll quickly notice that prompts do more than just create images. Perhaps there are areas you hadn't considered before that you could investigate further to hone your Midjourney skills.

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A field guide to the diversity of Midjourney prompts

A map of the image creation process and its prompts and prompt components.

I break down the image creation process into four major phases:

(1) Learning and accumulating resources. This is the phase in which users collect raw materials for image creation, such as community or Substack prompts, keywords, style reference codes, moodboard codes, and so on. The more resources gathered, the greater the creative potential, as all of the ingredients are readily available when creating images.

(2) Image creation. This is where the main action takes place: creating images. There are several components (commands, parameters, multi-prompts, keywords) and factors to consider.

(3) Editing. Generated images frequently require editing to correct abnormal hands , fingers and anatomy, as well as strange artifacts. Alternatively, editing is for removing or adding new elements to the composition.

(4) Post-production. Prompts can be used to facilitate the next processing steps in other software or AI models, as well as to help distribute images for their intended use cases.

The visual map will be used as a reference, much like a book's Table of Contents, to identify areas for more research and discussion. Without a map, it is more difficult to zero in on a prompting topic and to understand the various prompts' roles and use cases.

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Let’s start!