AI-generated images can be game-changers for your brand. But getting them right isn’t always easy. Here’s how to make Midjourney work for you:
Table of Contents
Step 1: Decide the visual style you want
What we mean here is, do you want your images to consistently look like illustrations, or do you want them to be realistic? Paintings? Comic book drawings?
There are many styles Midjourney has, and you can also tweak things to fit your desired outcome more.
But for step 1, make yourself familiar with some of the styles in Midjourney AI Styles library to see if you prefer any of them.
For us, we’ll use a more “realistic” style and that’s what we’ll continue using in the next steps.
Step 2: Define your brand color palette
See the above? It’s the color palette we will use in this example, but you can define your own too.
Either you already have it from your designer, or you have to create it yourself. Save it as a PNG and move to the next step.
Step 3: Save it as a style reference in Midjourney.
Upload to Midjourney, grab the link, and then type in /prefer option set
It should look like this once you type in the command:
In the “option” field, you write the keyword you want to call when using the color palette, for example, manu-example.
Press Tab and choose value in the next step, then paste the image link.
Press Enter, and you now have the color palette saved as tactics-palette.
Step 4: Test your color palette by generating an image.
Here’s a set of images we generated using that color palette.
The prompt looks like this:
“a young professional looking at a customer profile on an easel stand, with different profile picture, well lit bright modern conference room, table and chairs, white board, –ar 2:1 –sref –manu-example –sw 20”
Let’s explain the parts that generate this style.
Those are –sref and –sw.
–sref is the “style reference” where we tell Midjourney to use our color palette as the reference for the image it creates.
You can also reference normal images, and Midourney will try to replicate colors and style depending on the second parameter.
–sw is the “style weight” parameter and it tells Midjourney how much “like the style reference” the image should be.
We found that this is one part you have to experiment with regularly. Sometimes, –sw 5 is the right amount for picking up the colors.
Sometimes, you need –sw 20… Or sometimes, –sw 20 makes all shapes in the image look like a vertical rectangle, just like the shapes in the color palette.
Step 5: Experiment more with –sref, –sw, and keywords in your prompt
Now you have a good way to tell Midjourney to use your brand colors, so you have to experiment more to find the sweet spot.
- Different –sref images and –sw values. Midjourney Style Reference documentation will be very useful for that.
- Adjust your keywords in the prompt. You might want to try illustrations, you might want to be more descriptive or more generic.
We found that an important part of making images feel less generic and less like stock photos is to describe the emotion and the “vibe” of the image.
And human faces looking at the camera are still the ones most likely to look like stock photos.
Here’s why you should try this
There are two big reasons:
- It saves tons of time.
- It actually creates good, unique-looking images once you find your style.
Don’t forget you don’t have to generate the final asset with Midjourney.
You can still do edits in your favorite image editing tool. Or you can use the “Vary region” function to regenerate a particular part of the image.
Remember, AI tools evolve quickly. These steps focus on Midjourney’s Discord version, but the core ideas apply broadly.
Keep practicing. You’ll soon create images that truly reflect your brand, not just generic stock photos.