Ep. 8: Midjourney Style Reference (--sref): Everything You Need To Know (Literally)

0:00:00Intro

Play from 0:00:00 8:88:88 0:00:00 What's up, you Midjourney nerds? Rory Flynn, Jim Brocker. We're back in the building. It's a Friday. We're just going to go so deep on this one. Like I I I think we're going to hit rock bottom. And what we're going to hit rock bottom on is style reference. Yes. This is so so important. And you know, I think more and more people, once they've kind of like grasp it and start to use it, they're just doing amazing things with it. And it seems to be the most popular thing right now, I would say in Midjourney. And so, Rory and I were just talking about this last episode as we were going through the parameters. How do we cover this and all the parameters at the same time?

Play from 0:00:38 8:88:88 0:00:38 We thought this deserved its own episode. So, that's why we're here. And we're going to talk through a lot. Rory, before I get into the agenda for style references, what do you have to say for yourself? Well, it does need its own episode, number one. Number two, shoutout to my dad who apparently listens to this podcast now. He told me that I need a tan because you're looking way too summery and I'm looking way too like a tech guy, which I never have been in my life. This is uh, you know, I note noted and heard. Dad, I will get out in the sun over the next couple days because I can see it now and I'm pale as hell. So, that is that is one thing. But, it's this whole situation, dude. Like this this SRF thing, I don't think people have gone as crazy on it as you

Play from 0:01:24 8:88:88 0:01:24 can go. It's just when we talk about the end of Midjourney, like the absolute bottom of the pit, you can't get there. You just can't. You can't You can't do everything. You can't actually like figure out how many possibilities there are because it's trillions. It actually might be unlimited now at this point for the output that you can create. I think this is what differentiates Midjourney from a lot of the other platforms, right? We see a lot of these other challengers come up. Not saying they're better or worse anything. It's just like the customization and the creative ability you have on the tool is really to me it just unmatched. You don't have all these options on the other platforms. I don't know if you feel I think that's a No, that's that's spot on because I was just thinking about the way that those are set up, you know,

Play from 0:02:09 8:88:88 0:02:09 it's almost like with with any model where there's a Laura involved, you almost have to select kind of a style to get a style, right? Like there's no unique style image by image, right? It almost like groups them into a category, which I think is super interesting, right? Because I think those are trained totally different ways. Now, like before we go too deep, man. I mean, you're just kind of like jumping right in here, aren't you? Like My bad.

Play from 0:02:35 8:88:88 0:02:35 I need you to slow slow the hell down, man. I mean, I was trying to like comment on your vampire situation over there. You dude, first of all, this guy's been grinding. I'm going to give him a break. He also lives in New York. I'm in Atlanta. I also have a little bit of Armenian in my blood. I just I'm a little bit naturally a little bit darker, so tell your dad to take it easy on you. But at the same time, dude, I know you've been burning the candle at both ends. You got a big talk here in Budapest in 2 weeks.

Play from 0:03:00 8:88:88 0:03:00 Woo! 2 weeks? Yeah, a week. You're leaving in a week. But yeah, big things, dude, and I I know you're going to get some sun after that's all over, so. Me, too. I need to. My dad does like to rib me a little bit because, you know, God, he's retired and he can do whatever he wants. And you know, golf on a Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Sounds awesome. I would love to do that, but hey, this is not a this is not up for debate anymore. We got to we got to learn Midjourney. We got to talk about Midjourney. So, that's the that's where life takes us and yeah, Budapest. Going to be cool. Super excited. Never been there. If anyone's from Budapest, drop it in the comments.

Play from 0:03:29 8:88:88 0:03:29 Let me know where to go, what to do. I have no clue what I'm doing, but I'll be there for a couple days. So, I'm excited about that. And by the time that you listen to this, Rory will have not left yet. So, definitely take him up on that offer. If you know anything about Budapest, give him some hints. We don't want We want this guy to come back safe and and obviously have a great time at the same time, so that's important. Let's go through what we're going to cover today. I'm just going to kind of spit this all out. If I miss anything, Rory, just chime in, but we're going to talk through style reference. Like we said, we're going to try to hit rock bottom on this. What is it? How do you use it? Why does it matter? Even some creative ways to use it. We're going to talk about this different style reference versions, which I don't think a lot of people know about. There are actually four of those.

Play from 0:04:13 8:88:88 0:04:13 We're going to talk about style codes. What are those? How do you use those? How do you unlock them? How do you create your own, which I think is kind of interesting. And then style reference style codes, the difference between those two things, maybe how you should think about using each. We're going to talk about blending style reference. We're going to talk about stacking style reference with an image reference. We're going to talk about using S refs for branding. So, like we're literally covering the gamut here. Uh did I miss anything?

Play from 0:04:39 8:88:88 0:04:39 No, dude. I think you nailed it. Okay. Yeah, I think so. Well, with that said, man, I mean, time is time is ticking. Let's get right into style reference, dude. Can you tell me what the hell style reference is? Well, essentially, you know, if you think about I like to call it the brand of the image. You can transfer that. So, if you have something that's super unique-looking and you want to take it and put it on another image, basically, style reference allows you to reference that style and then transfer it to as many other images as you want. It was great for when it first came out. I think we were all kind of pining for that. We wanted it. We're all trying to hack around it. So, typically, to go back, the way that we used to have to do style and keep the styles, you had to really understand text prompting and how to like really be consistent within your

0:04:45Reference Basics

Play from 0:05:26 8:88:88 0:05:26 text prompting. So, again, we break everything down. Typically, Drew and I, you know, we like to have our little prompt formula. It was it's just a guiding sort of light to how to get to the end result. So, if you had your shot type, your subject in action, your environment, but you also had your colors, your textures, your technical settings, whatever that whether that be a camera or an animation style, whatever that might be, composition, lighting, things like that. You had to keep or that back half of the prompt structure very the same. So, you could just switch the subject action environment. So, if you had something like muted colors, leading lines, you know, sharp textures, you could keep that across an entire image set. Now, Sref came along kind of like negated that, you know, you don't need to do that anymore. You can just kind of utilize a

Play from 0:06:13 8:88:88 0:06:13 subject a style reference and then transfer the aesthetic from one image to the next. So, it's a little bit different than image prompting. It's different than seed, but it's also the best parameter update to me that they've added. so. Yeah. Yeah, I was just about to say that, dude. I think so, too, right? And while we're going back to the history lesson behind this, you mentioned including these things very explicitly in the prompt. I think the other way that people are sort of hacking around this too at the time was a lot of image blending. So, they might take a subject and then they might take some sort of texture or color or pattern and then combine those two to almost fuse together something that has a little bit of style. The other way that I was doing it quite a bit was was basically using image weight. And we've

Play from 0:06:59 8:88:88 0:06:59 talked about this before trying to find where that sweet spot is where it takes enough of the aesthetic, but not necessarily the subject, the action, and everything else with it, right? So, it like you kind of had to scale it down to apply some of that style and aesthetic over to your new image. And so, like those were some of the the loopholes to get around almost anything that we didn't have yet, you know, and that was the same thing that was true with character consistency and all that stuff, but those two come to mind for me. And then obviously we saw, you know, style tuner drop, which funny enough like that was when I was in New York last year and and you and I got together. It dropped I think the day that we got together. And that was sort of like an eye-opening moment, too, because that was the intermediary phase between where we're at now with Sref and

Play from 0:07:45 8:88:88 0:07:45 those loopholes. And you and I were just like, holy man. Like you know, style tuner super cool. You know, you can go through and get all these options. It did have some flaws, but that was sort of like the preview of what we were going to get in the future. Yeah, RIP to style tuner Midjourney if you're listening again, which maybe you are, maybe you aren't. Can we bring something along the same lines back or at least like a preferred preferred option set for old style codes or something along the lines where we can personalize. Maybe just can we generate a style reference code from a specific image that we can transfer it to everything else. I think that would also be great. Like here, generate code on this image, then bang, transfer that

Play from 0:08:31 8:88:88 0:08:31 to every other image. That would be exceptional to me because I style tuner to me was like the the most fun I've had on Midjourney. I think like since I started. It was just like whole my god, I can do anything I want. And then it was pretty interesting. I would say a lot of my personalization codes now look very similar to what my style codes looked like cuz I was trying to keep them more general to really then like adjust colors and adjust different textures and things like that, but this was sort of like their update to that. And I don't know if they got some bad feedback on style tuner or people just weren't using it cuz that just it just kind of died after 5.2. They're like, nah, we're done. Not going to use it anymore.

Play from 0:09:08 8:88:88 0:09:08 Yeah, I wonder what that like thought was to just completely cut away from it and and pivot directions. I don't think they really gave us a a lot of clarity on that. No, quick quick hint if anyone wants to do this though, this we'll get into this probably at some point. But one of my old hacks is I go back into Discord. I go through I turn the version to 5.2. I create some style codes that I like. I come back to version 6.1 and then I use those 5.2 images as style references.

Play from 0:09:40 8:88:88 0:09:40 So, if you're thinking about and you liked that, you can always go back and do it. It's not gone forever. You just have to know how to kind of work the system. You know what I just remember about style codes that was sort of addicting, too, was you got back all these different selections where you would pick one or the other or not anything, right? Like so, each selection sort of created this unique code with it. Yeah. Right? And that's where I think this sort of evolved into what it is today, but I thought that was super interesting, too, because you could essentially have a really awesome tune code and then all of a sudden you deselect one and you got another cool one that's unique, right? And so, it was like you have infinite options almost within one data set, depending on how good sort of what you got back was. I

Play from 0:10:25 8:88:88 0:10:25 mean, I thought that was pretty fascinating because it was it was like, "Holy like I'm getting some pretty good ones here." The problem was though, too, like there was no no spot to save them. So, Yeah. I had to like make a notion and just kind of store them in there and I've never opened it since. It's collecting dust, but you know, you just kind of felt like, "Oh this is a good one. Got to save this, but I've nowhere to put it." This was This was pre-folders, pre-smart folders. This was That was when preferred option set came into To me, that was like the first time I used it where I was like, "How do I save these and how do I remember them?" More so. So, See, look at you, bro. I I didn't even I didn't even use that. So, look at me.

Play from 0:11:01 8:88:88 0:11:01 It was like I just like whatever the first image was that I generated, it would be like, you know, maybe I was doing it on some scene in Cusco, Peru, whatever. I'm just saying that. And then I would make the preferred option set {dash} {dash} Cusco, so I could just remember that. It was like, "Oh, that's the one I liked." But again, like that was awesome for when you were on Discord. There's a few things, right, that I still miss from Discord, but I will gladly take the experience on the website right now, especially the the editor feature. Thank you, guys, for that. But yeah, Hey, while we're here, can we can we also just point out that now anybody can jump into the Midjourney website, anybody.

Play from 0:11:34 8:88:88 0:11:34 We We were pining for this. We were pounding the table on this just last week? Last week? 2 weeks ago? Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it was, we were just saying it was really you uh specifically being very vocal about it. You're like, "What are we doing?" Yeah, like seriously. Why are we still doing this with 10 images? And sure enough, it's now available. If you are one of the few that I would say are listening to this but have not used the website, now's the time to do it. Yeah, you don't need Discord for anything anymore, which I think is like a whole 'nother conversation. We'll save that for next time, but the barrier to entry now to use Midjourney has never been lower.

Play from 0:12:10 8:88:88 0:12:10 And they're slinging free trials again. Slinging them. Get on Get in on it while it's free. That disappeared for I don't know, a year. They used to have them, and now they're back. So, I would say no better time. And you can only You can connect through Google. You don't even have to connect through Discord anymore, which I thought was an interesting for I did, too. hanging on for so long. Maybe they could do that for a while. I don't know if someone No. knows that probably, but it's just like, "Oh, okay. So, no more Discord needed." But how many more Discord users do they need? They have a They have a big base.

Play from 0:12:43 8:88:88 0:12:43 That's right. I I get it. I you know, I don't want to lose people on Discord. I don't want to lose interaction, the data, the community. It's cool. People will still be there. Still a good channel for for different reasons, but also you know, I think with with this, if you're listening and you have coworkers, right? We've We've already done a professional potential on using Midjourney for work. Rory and I both done that. I mean, this is a great time to get coworkers on here. With the free trial, with the no, you know, barrier to entry to use the website, because this is how you would get things like that expense. This is how you would start to get people thinking about differently with their workflows, their processes, the tools they're using.

Play from 0:13:22 8:88:88 0:13:22 Midjourney's really not that expensive when you're looking at it from a a company budget perspective. So, yeah, time's have been better. With that said, I don't want to go down too far that rabbit hole, Rory. Let's stay on style reference. We talked about what it is, you know, in terms of how you use it. Pretty easy, but also it's easy because it does have the website now. I think what was difficult with with Discord was the fact that you almost had to, you know, with image reference, character reference, and style reference, like add all these different URL strings in there.

Play from 0:13:52 8:88:88 0:13:52 Yeah. Along with the parameters, along with the prompt, and it was just like your head's kind of spinning at that point. So, like it was pretty common for me to get errors, I think, at that time if I ever tried doing that in Discord. With Midjourney, it's super easy on the website. I'm just going to pull up an example here. I've taken something from Pinterest. I'm just going to right click, click copy image. I'm going to go over to Midjourney. I'm going to paste this.

0:14:15Style Weight

Play from 0:14:18 8:88:88 0:14:18 And if you're not familiar with this, you have three really convenient options here. This first one is your default. It's going to default to an image reference. You've got a style reference, which is this paper clip here. And you've got a character reference, which is the silhouette of a person here. For this example, we're going to click style reference, the paper clip. We're going to go ahead and just put in Rory, give me something, man. Give me something random. pink circle on a black background.

Play from 0:14:44 8:88:88 0:14:44 Minimalism. I don't know. I'm trying to I'm trying to match that, see if they would actually give you something that was pretty simple beforehand and try to match the style. in the Egypt desert. That sounds way cooler than what I came up with. know, I'm just thinking. So, let's do like a 32, and let's do like a S250, let's personalize, and then here's where we're also going to think about how we're going to use this. So, first step of this is selecting that this is a style reference. What's different from Discord is you do not have to copy and paste the link. This is the equivalent of typing in Sref. So, I don't need to to that again. All I need to do is type in {dash} {dash} sw which controls how much of that style weight I want to apply. That threshold for style weight

Play from 0:15:31 8:88:88 0:15:31 is anywhere between 0 and 1,000. The default is going to be 100, which I think is a really good default. So, why don't we just leave that as 100? If you do leave it as the default, you don't even need to put that. But, for this example, we'll just go ahead and include it. Let's include this at different weights just to kind of show how this is going to return our results for us at the same time. And let's go turbo cuz we're trying to go through this.

Play from 0:15:56 8:88:88 0:15:56 Okay. Let's see what we got. Is this turbo? I This isn't moving fast enough for me, man. Sometimes you got to refresh it when you do when you do turbo to catch it up. It's really annoying. Okay, so we've got the results coming back here. Remember, I style weighted three different examples here applying more and more of the style reference as we go through this. So, I'm just going to quickly jump through these examples. This is a style weight of 100. Again, our prompt was pyramid in the Egypt desert. Now, what's happening here is with this style reference, it's taking the colors, the aesthetic, some of the texture. And if you really dial this up to a high, high value, even some of the actual image that I found, too, which I don't I don't know that a lot of people necessarily talk about. But, I think it's important to note when you're trying to find that sweet spot with

Play from 0:16:42 8:88:88 0:16:42 style weight. So, this is what we've got back with a style weight of 100. This is going to be 250. Right? So, you start to see some of that more of that texture come in. And then this is where you get basically this dialed all the way up. And that looks pretty awesome to me. Legit. So, only say that to say some of these style references, you need to really play with the value because if you don't want it to take too much of the image.

Play from 0:17:10 8:88:88 0:17:10 Now, this isn't a bad example because this is sort of an abstract thing. But, let's just say a person is in here and it's got a lot of colors as well. At some point, it's going to include the colors. At some point, it's also going to include the person with the colors. This would be a good opportunity to run something like permutations to really find wherever that sweet spot is. Rory, let me toss it over to you. Any anything you want to add to that or touch on with this example?

Play from 0:17:35 8:88:88 0:17:35 No, I think it's pretty good. I think maybe if you wanted to show how to just add a style from your own image library, right? If you wanted to go in Perfect. just copy that prompt and just like drop another image in. It's so simple to do that now. So, let's do that. Yeah. Like, let's just take this and I think actually let's keep the same prompt. But, let's just change the style reference because I think this will give you a really good apples-to-apples comparison in terms of what this is going to do.

Play from 0:18:06 8:88:88 0:18:06 For style weight, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to do 100, which is the default. We're going to do 250, and we're going to, you know, crank this all the way up to 999. I might also do, just for this example, like a lower number like 35. And the reason for that is, like I said, some of these have more sensitivity than others. Let's see what this brings to the fold. Now, this is This is going to be a much more interesting example from the standpoint of I've got a person in here.

Play from 0:18:37 8:88:88 0:18:37 Right? And this looks nothing like a pyramid in the desert, where the other one had like a little bit of similarity to it. So, this is a low value of 35. You can see some of those colors coming through. This is your style value of 100, where you see this come through a lot more. Then you get into something like 250. Right? And they start to get very, very trippy. And then you got something like a style weight 999. So, I mean, these are out there, but that's The important part is one, you can do this with any image you created. So, this is a great chance to repurpose things that are already in your library or in your archive rather and use them as style references. This is also a chance to grab anything from a third-party website like a Google, like a Pinterest to use those things as well.

Play from 0:19:22 8:88:88 0:19:22 So, I think those are those are probably the two examples that that are probably going to work best just for showing you what style reference is and how you're going to use it. Totally. I think that's good. Also, let me let me jump in. I'll show sort of the difference here cuz I think this can be confusing unless you actually see it broken out, which is how do we look at the difference between image reference and style reference. So, I think this is a good example of what Drew was talking about with structure. Basically, we have two unique images, seal in as an image prompt.

Play from 0:19:53 8:88:88 0:19:53 What happens when you image prompt is we get this flamingo that sort of looks like the seal, right? Like we took a lot of the seal construction, where it's placed in the image, like the colors, and it's kind of like blending the seal and the flamingo together cuz why would a flamingo have like these really black feathers um you know, just be positioned like laying on the sand like the seal is on the rock over here. With image prompting, you're taking over some of the construction of the image.

Play from 0:20:20 8:88:88 0:20:20 Yes, you will take some of this aesthetic, but also you're going to take some of the construction of the base object or character that's in it. So, when you're using style reference instead, it's basically we're just taking this aesthetic and transferring it down. Like we still have the same pink flamingo, but it's in like this more dark black muted environment. It's a delicate balance. It's probably also solid to take a look at this from like a very granular perspective and you know, one of the things I love is using low style weights, right? So, not going super high because sometimes I just want a little bit of the image versus a lot of it. This one's a pretty solid example. I used basically the same seed.

Play from 0:20:58 8:88:88 0:20:58 So, everything should be fairly similar to show kind of the progression of stuff. And again, like two radically different images. So, use a very simple prompt here where we have essentially this prompt is photo of a woman. Pretty simple, right? We have this this eye and this face and then I use this crazy S ref which is in a woman's face with like all this crazy paint on it. The the photos couldn't be more different. I know. So, again, so you can see like where this really starts to starts to influence. When we do this at low levels with style weight zero, right? Like we're using style weight zero, 35, 50, 65 and 80. These are below the default which is 100. So, you're going to take over some of this image but not like this full style. So, if I like this and maybe I want to transfer some colors or a little bit of the effects, staying

Play from 0:21:43 8:88:88 0:21:43 under the default can be really helpful cuz we'll look at style weight, you know, again, this is zero, normal image. We go to 35, we get some cool like little shading under the eyes, some real crazy detail in the eye with some of the colors which is nice. We go to style weight 50, we start to get more even that 35's dope, you know? Right. Yeah, again, it's just super like you don't have to go all the way to this. We can just go to this. And sometimes you just want to take a little bit over. 65, we get a little bit more.

Play from 0:22:13 8:88:88 0:22:13 80, we get some more painting on the face and then 100, the default, we start to get like this somewhat of a transfer. What you did before and then we see what this looks like as we go by. We have zero, then we have our 50 and then we have our default. As we keep going, we get to 200, we start getting a lot more detail. 300 where we're basically almost there. 400 to me is pretty much transferring the entire style. 500, pretty much the entire style. 600, the entire style.

Play from 0:22:41 8:88:88 0:22:41 700, we get a little bit more detail in terms of like the eyes up here and maybe some of the other hands that are now added to the face more. I I always see I always see this. Typically between like 600 and 800, I never see much of a difference. But when you get up to 900 and 1,000, this is where you can start to see some more like really fine, intricate details, especially, you know, the skin texture and the lip texture and everything, you know, details on the face. So, when you pull it back and you see everything, you see the progression from nothing to getting a little bit more. Uh typically, this is what I always find, too, between like 400 and 800, somewhat similar. That's just my own personal opinion. I don't know if you feel that way. Is that something you notice?

Play from 0:23:25 8:88:88 0:23:25 I do. I do. I see the diminishing returns. I I don't think there's much of a difference between somewhere in that 6 7 all the way up to 1,000. Again, I think with most of the parameters that exist, sometimes you can get more accurate results from like a 600 than 1,000, right? So So, that's pretty common, I think, in in some of the things that they do. I love that example, though, because those are two totally different images.

Play from 0:23:51 8:88:88 0:23:51 And so, this is what we're talking about when we're really thinking about Midjourney versus other tools. You can fine-tune that anywhere between 1 and 1,000. I mean, for me, like I have a totally different style than Rory, and I could say, "Hey, look, there's a sweet spot in there for me." We could use the same thing and get two totally different results from that. That's important to mention because, you know, in the sort of AI image generation world, it's all about, to me, control and driving uniqueness. I don't want things that just anybody else can create at the same time. Like, I'm trying to find these pockets or these corners that I'm getting into that maybe other people can't get into or it's more difficult, you know, to find. You know, just something that makes it unique because with the democratization of the

0:24:30Blending Styles

Play from 0:24:38 8:88:88 0:24:38 creativity, it doesn't feel so exciting when everybody can do exactly the same thing or gets exactly the same results. 100%. We talked about this on a podcast maybe 2 weeks ago, right? It's like, "Where do we go once we've hit like extreme photorealism?" Yeah. That's it. Once it hits that peak, like it can't go much further than that. So, you know, then we need to differentiate on control, and then we also need to differentiate on creativity. That's what this allows for. That's what Midjourney allows for is like you really don't have There's no end, like we said five times already. You can go as far as you want.

Play from 0:25:09 8:88:88 0:25:09 But, if everyone's going to reach this photorealistic standpoint, again, then everyone's stuff is going to look exactly the same unless you have the ability to go and make super creative stuff. That's why style is important. That's why we're covering it today. That's why personalization is is probably right there with style reference in terms of Midjourney's differentiation in the market, right? I mean, the personalization, which we talked about this prior, but the ability to stop thinking, "Hey, quality is only going to go so far." and start thinking about, "How do we please people individually?"

Play from 0:25:40 8:88:88 0:25:40 Because we can't please everybody with the same model that does the exact same thing. We have to get into people's interests and their specific style, their visual signature, what they like, you know, different poses, camera angles, colors, contrast, like all those different things that really affect the image. And and I've just found, and I know you have too, that like I get to better images much quicker. Oh, yeah. And this is just the early stage of personalization with that said. I mean, this just dropped less than 2 months ago. They've already updated it, I think, once or twice. This is going to get better with 6.2. This is going to get better with seven. That to me is the super exciting part about all this. I think that was a great example, though.

Play from 0:26:19 8:88:88 0:26:19 I think the other part that maybe we want to touch on while we're while we're sticking with style reference. Two things, Rory. I think the style versions Oh, yeah. and then also I think the the thing that you unlocked, which is using style reference in editor. Yeah. But, the style versions are essentially the different stages of style reference. So, when this launched, they had a V1, then they made a second iteration, which was V2, a third, which was basically a build on top of one, a more vibey, {quote} {unquote}, style version. And then four, which is sort of like the updated version of two. So, there are actually four different style versions that you can use when you're prompt. I don't think a lot of people know that or they talk about it. I don't really see anybody doing like the compare and

Play from 0:27:05 8:88:88 0:27:05 contrast thing with them either. So, maybe just for quick reference for us, we're just going to hop in here and show you how this would work. Now, you could run a permutation, which is what we're going to do here for the different style versions. So, I'll just run a very simple prompt. Let's just do 3D floating shape. I'm going to take style weight down to I don't know, maybe let's just do 80 so I don't get any of the girl here. Let's do 1 2 3 and 4. Let's hit run. And we're just going to compare the differences. I think these are going to be pretty minor, but when we're talking about these micro decisions, these controls that you have like these are all at your expense. I I love this SV1 right here. You know what I mean? Like this this is wild. It's like

Play from 0:27:50 8:88:88 0:27:50 I haven't even run SV1 in a long time. I'm a big fan of two, by the way. Two, for whatever reason, always always pleased me. Oh, yeah? Okay. Yeah, I don't know why. I I love it. Cuz I play around with this often. I I do like these. Yeah, I do like them. I I do like going back to to you know, when I'm when I find something that I really like, I'm sure everyone's hit this. When you hit like that fever pitch when you're just hitting regenerate, regenerate, regenerate and it's giving you heaters every single time. Then I'm like, all right, let's let's screw around with style version. Let's go 1 2 3 4. See which ones look better then keep going from there. And then even if you like this style version three, right? You don't have to use it on every single image. You can take that style version three, one of those images, and apply it That's right. That's why this is endless. I think that's a great point. I

Play from 0:28:37 8:88:88 0:28:37 mean, this rabbit hole goes really really deep. I mean, when we're talking about creating your own style reference. Like we just made a great point. Maybe there's something in here that I like. But then I want to use that style, but I like the output better. That's how you would maybe combine those things. Cuz like take this take this, right? Just hit just hit prompt and then hit prompt and style. And then just change it to instead of 3D floating shape like 3D floating pyramid.

Play from 0:29:03 8:88:88 0:29:03 And just see if it looks exactly the same. This is how we test stuff, right? Like this is how you test live. And again, you know, this is how you can make a condensed set if you're doing maybe something like icons or want to do something in that exact style, right? So now we have a pyramid in that style that was just very similar if you're trying to build things for websites or, you know, you have little, you know, you want to you want to create again like this set of maybe innocuous images like this or innocuous shapes. You can kind of keep it the same with something like style reference. So it brands. Brands the image. That's a to me very simple way to like kind of go down a rabbit hole, especially for things like, you know, holding items like this or where, you know, you website, social media, anything that you're using these for

Play from 0:29:48 8:88:88 0:29:48 could be super useful. Love it. Yeah, I I I mean, we'll get into the brand thing. That's that's pretty deep as well, but I I think that's a terrific example of style reference. We haven't even got into the codes yet, right? So that's a whole different story about how you could apply style. But style reference I think is more malleable because you could take any image. You're not trying to unlock some random code and then trying to find some Then which we'll get into brands, but I think if you're a brand, you're probably thinking more on the style reference side because otherwise you're digging for a long time until you find a style code. But Rory, I would love for you to jump into something that you and I were talking about hypothetically on last week's podcast, which was when we were covering

Play from 0:30:34 8:88:88 0:30:34 the editor. We were wondering, hey, like could you use style reference in editor? Could you use something like an image reference in editor as you scale out to fill in pixels or change? You didn't waste any time. You went right into that and discovered that you could and I think that's pretty exciting. So, I'm going to let you walk us through that. Guys, it's going to be totally random. Let's just see if we can make this happen live here so you can, you know, Midjourney is not perfect. We're not perfect. So, let's see what we can do, right? So, we'll use the same example here that we used to show the style weight. So, maybe we go to editor.

Play from 0:31:08 8:88:88 0:31:08 What we're trying to talk about here is maybe we change this to 3 by 2. And we'll slide this over here. Now, because I was doing style weight zero to show everyone what style weight zero does, meaning it doesn't apply any of this, we can probably dial this up to let's just say 450. We add some of this into the mix. Now, actually let me expand this slightly. There you go.

0:31:30Editor Integration

Play from 0:31:33 8:88:88 0:31:33 Yeah, so now we should we should get something a little bit unique. I'm going to erase some of this black and we're thinking about this like Photoshop like layers, right? Like this is going to basically complete a different layer and we can create almost like a collage cuz now I'm going to try to add the style reference in with a higher style weight. So, in theory, this should populate something a little bit more colorful in the background. So, let's see what's let's see what happens here.

Play from 0:31:59 8:88:88 0:31:59 So, just like that, now we've added something totally different. Now, regardless, we're we're looking at this from doing this live and seeing random stuff, but again, like that's that's super unique in terms of what it created. Cuz you can then go and edit this any way you want. I could take this and then try to edit around here. I don't like, you know, I don't like this. I don't like maybe some of this stuff up here.

Play from 0:32:26 8:88:88 0:32:26 And then let's take this style weight back down to 90. And even if I wanted to, right? I can take this and use this as an image or a character reference, too. But I think, you know, just noticing that you can do stuff like this, which you can't. You can't prompt for any of this stuff. I would I don't even know how you'd even remotely start to prompt this. So, we can get really creative with what you're doing here. Again, it might not be the best example, but just showing you how you can utilize a style reference within editor to get some different results. And again, you can start to blend like if this stuff doesn't look good to you, and you want to maybe blend the faces a little bit more, you're just looking at that that type of edit right there. Maybe we get rid of some of this.

Play from 0:33:06 8:88:88 0:33:06 And you could even like you could even scale out, drag, you know, the girl on the right more toward the middle, and then maybe her other side of the face starts to fill in with the style, too, right? Yeah, 100%. This is why I think it's so when we say the options are limitless, this is what we're talking about. Cuz then you can go and probably add another style in here. You know, let's say we scaled out, and then we wanted to drop Oh, here we go. Let's do this.

Play from 0:33:32 8:88:88 0:33:32 All right, so let's just say we wanted to scale this back. Let's add this style in here now. Sref paste. We got that in there. Let's go style weight 490, get rid of that, and then submit. So, now this should, in theory, create something totally random. Again, we're always talking about building in layers or building in steps. This is one way to really conceptualize it of how that can actually be done. So, once we add this, right? Now we get this totally unique effect, which you just cannot prompt for something like this.

Play from 0:34:05 8:88:88 0:34:05 And maybe that's your style, maybe it's not, but again, super cool to be able to sort of start to combine these things. That's fun to me, cuz that opens up a whole new thing. Cuz you can do that with image prompting, you can do that with character reference, you can do that with the style codes that we'll get into eventually. So, you can build like this infinite sort of scroll almost, or this infinite like parallax sort of effect where you're coming just out, and everything is just building around it in layers and editing within. You have like a it's essentially Photoshop now. Like you can do that without some of the key capabilities.

Play from 0:34:37 8:88:88 0:34:37 Let's just say you wanted to leave that black and white and then you just wanted to change her lips to the style. Yeah. That could be a perfect example of how you might use it where it's just a monochrome photo and then you just have that one pop of color. You know, like things like that. So, I think that's more like you could really maybe take more of an artistic approach by by utilizing that in editor. I don't think either of us know just how how powerful that ability is just yet because it's so brand new and editor just dropped last week. But, I do think it's cool that you can use that and it opens the door to more possibilities if nothing else.

Play from 0:35:11 8:88:88 0:35:11 For building layers. Exactly what you just said about the lips. Let's say you have that black and white photo, you're having a hard time getting the neon lips. That was just saying like black and white neon lips. It might be hard to text prompt for that or style reference for that. I would just go and create a separate image of like close-up of neon lips and then basically bring that in as a style reference in editor when you highlight the lips, use that as a style reference. It'll work. I've done that exact example. Instead of trying to do everything in one prompt, you can do it in putting all the pieces together. So, it's just like, how do I get to that point?

Play from 0:35:43 8:88:88 0:35:43 I love that. One other point on style reference before maybe we move to style codes is you do have the ability to use more than one style reference. Just like with anything else, just like with image reference, just like with character reference, style reference, you can use multiple references to bring on an image, right? So, if you've got maybe two contrasting styles, you want to fuse those things together and then apply that fusion as a Right? Like that's a possibility. I've seen a lot of those floating out there, too, where it's like, "Hey, maybe people play with two or three different codes that they like and they see how they go together." I know when style references dropped, that's what I did almost immediately as I wanted to kind of see "Well, I like this style, this style, this style. Like what if it happens if I kind of fuse those things together?" And you get some great results doing that, too. All you

Play from 0:36:30 8:88:88 0:36:30 have to do is your if you're blending those, right, is just put multiple versions of those into your prompt. So, we showed you how to drag and drop any image to use a style. You would do the same thing if you're adding more than one. And then also like within your own images, too, right? Sometimes my favorite stuff is a mixture of a black and white and then something super colorful. Like when I'm doing two style references, like do something that's super high contrast black and white and then some of that that's like crazy neon color saturated or whatever. And like that blending often times is really soft and cool and it's not really something you can achieve by text prompting. But if you want to get super creative and you want to blend an illustrative style with a photorealistic style, a lot of times you get this nice meshing of both.

Play from 0:37:13 8:88:88 0:37:13 So, you'll have some cool like illustrated elements to your images while still having like a photorealistic type look to it, which to me is always fun cuz it just it's just again something you cannot prompt for. You it's too hard to do that without style references. Love it. Why don't we move on to style codes? People have seen style codes quite a bit. Maybe even think they might be two different things. I mean, they both they both are technically style references. One just has an exact code attached to it, whereas the other, right, style reference is just any image you take.

0:37:28Style Codes

Play from 0:37:47 8:88:88 0:37:47 It doesn't give you a number a numerical code or anything like that. It's just copy and paste and dragging it into your prompt itself. Whereas a code, you need to list that code out, those numerical digits. There are said to be billions of these codes, up to four or five billion. So, you know, I'm sure maybe with some of these crazy people out there, we're probably getting close to unlocking all of them, but billion is a big number. I mean, when you really think about it.

Play from 0:38:15 8:88:88 0:38:15 So, I'm not I'm really not sure, but you know, style codes are basically unlocked within Midjourney. So, if you haven't run this experiment before, you basically have to type in a prompt {dash} {dash} sref, and then you're going to type in random. So, {dash} {dash} sref space random, and that's going to give you unique code, a random code. The thing to know is you don't have any control over the type of style that you're going to get back. Some of them you're going to absolutely hate.

Play from 0:38:44 8:88:88 0:38:44 Some of them you're absolutely love. There's going to be a lot that you're just like, "Eh, you know, like it's whatever." Just so we get a little bit of visual, let's just kind of show, you know, how that would work. It's it's super super easy, so I'll just quickly show you how you would go about doing that. You're just going to go into your prompt box, prompt whatever you want, whatever aspect ratio you want. Let's you go ahead and take some of this extra stuff out of here. I like to run like a stylized 250. There's no right or wrong there. And then what you're going to do is {dash} {dash} sref random. And if you want to unlock more than one at a time, right, you need to be in faster turbo mode to do this, but you can use the repeat parameter, which we talked about last week, and then enter any numerical value between 0 and 40. Now, that again, like we mentioned, does depend on your

Play from 0:39:31 8:88:88 0:39:31 plan. So, if you're on a basic plan, you can't run that higher, I think, higher than four. If you're on sort of like the middle plan, I don't think you can run that higher than 10. If you're on the What is it? Pro and Mega? Pro and Mega? You can run that all the way up to to 40. But for this example, like let's just run 10. I'm just going to help go ahead and put in 3D floating pyramid, aspect ratio 1 by 1 square, stylized 250, sref random, {dash} {dash} repeat 10. Let's go ahead and submit that. This is going to give me back 10 different examples, same prompt. You can now see here on the side that I've got a number, a numerical value attached to each style.

Play from 0:40:12 8:88:88 0:40:12 Right? So, the style weight, because I didn't type anything there, is going to default to 100, which I think is like more than enough to to test the differences in these. If you really wanted to go to a little bit more extreme as to what the S ref uncovers, like you could dial that up a little bit higher to like a 500 or even a 1,000. But, these are the differences, right? I've got four images here with this style reference code.

Play from 0:40:38 8:88:88 0:40:38 I've got another four with a different style reference code, another four, and these can be anything from like super colorful to black and white, to illustrative, to line drawing, to monochrome, all kinds of different stuff. So, this can appeal to everybody, but also you do need to spend some time to find the right ones that speak to you because sometimes you could go through a whole list and you're just like, "I don't really like any of those." So, let me run 10 more. Happens all the time, by the way. All the time.

Play from 0:41:07 8:88:88 0:41:07 So, if you wanted to keep one, now you've got this code. So, if I wanted to take this, I would just click this and now I've got that code right here. So, that's all style codes are. Just a different type of style reference. It's in its own category. You know, we talk about things like, how do you use style references for brands? Yeah, I mentioned this earlier, but if you're a brand, you know, you could use a style code. The problem with that is how long is it going to take you to unlock one that feels like your brand because you have no control over the color that comes back or the style that comes back.

Play from 0:41:41 8:88:88 0:41:41 Maybe the faster and more cohesive way to do that is just to take any existing style reference, right? That could be maybe even one single image that you have that represents your brand, and find out where that variable in style weight fits. Or, right, if you don't really want to go that route, like something else that I've done in the past is like just taking something like a brand swatch of colors, and then just screenshotting the swatches of the three different brand colors, and using a slow or Jesus, I can't talk. A low style weight on those. That also really works well if you don't really have an image that kind of feels like you are ready.

Play from 0:42:18 8:88:88 0:42:18 So, I mean there are multiple ways to to skin that cat. 100% style codes, the one thing that's great about them is that they're totally unique. The one thing that's bad about them is hard to control. That's that's the you know the the case in point of it, but they're fun and they have some really cool stuff. If you get into them and you find the right ones, blending them to me is probably the most fun thing. It's just like what kind of craziness can we come up with? Let's just throw all these things into one image and see you know if we can short circuit Midjourney's brain cuz I think that to me has always been the most fun. It's like let's just push this thing to the limit.

Play from 0:42:49 8:88:88 0:42:49 it. Yeah, let's try. Like do something crazy. Like you could take a style reference image and a style code. Yes. And mix those. Cuz maybe from the style code perspective you like that it's a line drawing kind of thing and then the style reference is your brand colors. Totally. got a very unique style. So, that's maybe a way that you can incorporate both. So, I mean there are plenty of options of how you go about doing that for a brand, but again one of those things with style reference that it there is no end to it. You can literally go in any direction that fits your need.

Play from 0:43:19 8:88:88 0:43:19 Yeah, then also with the with the style reference codes, you can weight them. Meaning like oh, if you put code X and code Y, those two are different. You can have one be like three times as heavy verse one you know verse one times as heavy. Meaning like oh, we want X more of style X verse Y. So, you know I think it's probably a good opportunity to show that maybe. All right. So, I'm in my little S ref code folder. Got some hacks for folders too that we can talk about on how to keep these things organized. Let's just say I wanted to blend a couple of these style codes right here. Pretty unique style. Let's put this in here. The style reference code is 4222 or whatever the hell that is.

Play from 0:44:05 8:88:88 0:44:05 Let's take my personalize out so it doesn't affect this. Now, let's find another style that's like totally random. Like this one. We'll add that so now you have two in here, right? You can run that. And when we get it, it should be a blending of both of those styles. So we have like that really kind of interesting unique look and then we have some of the really like grungy street style photography setting. Now, here looks like one came through a lot more.

Play from 0:44:34 8:88:88 0:44:34 Maybe I don't want some of that illustrative stuff to come through. You can go in here. All you got to do is do colon colon and then add a value. So let's just say we want this to be one and we want this to come through more. Let's do three. This will now be three it'll weight this style code three times as much as this one. Hit enter. We'll watch this thing kind of pop out here. And it should be more in like the black and white style now with some subtleties of the other piece. Right now, it didn't even see it was still heavily influenced by that other one so we can go even further. We can make this eight to one.

Play from 0:45:11 8:88:88 0:45:11 So, this should be way more in the black and white style than in the colorful style but we should still have some little aspects of it. So we keep some of this little like illustrative style. It was way more in the black and white now. But if you flipped it and we went one and then six, we're going to get end up with a lot more colorful like illustrative style more like this way more on that scale. So, you can play with them. We're going to be way more way more unique into that style code. How those look very very interesting cuz I mean if you guys can go nuts, right? If you wanted to go in here. This is where I say like going nuts. This is what this is what I mean.

Play from 0:45:51 8:88:88 0:45:51 Like I'll go in here and then just find all right, I want to add this one. Let's add this style code and then let's find one that's maybe a little bit less crazy, maybe more minimalist like this. We'll add this S ref. And then, you know, let's find one more that we like that we can just drop in here. All right, cool. Let's do like some vintage style. So, now this should be totally off the wall. Who knows how this is going to end up. It's totally random. Again, something I'll never be able to prompt for. And it looks like, again, because you guys get to see all the errors when we do this live, I'm going to do the six.

Play from 0:46:30 8:88:88 0:46:30 This should essentially blend all of those looks into something that's totally unique. These are all totally radically different and you can go play with the weights on each one. People might be wondering how many of these codes you can blend together, as well. Yeah. I can't remember what the answer is on that. It's either I think it's six. Maybe. It might be six or four. I can't remember. We'll double-check on that for you guys. I I don't necessarily think you need any more than three, personally. But, if you're just like a crazy MF'er, I mean, I guess you could.

Play from 0:47:01 8:88:88 0:47:01 Yeah. You can get when you've balanced it appropriately, it can get really good. You know, you can start to take a lot of elements from this. And let me actually pull something up real quick. I'll show you what I'm talking about. When you have them balanced and you have them balanced appropriately, you can take a lot of different things. So, bring this bad boy up. So, when I'm generating, right, a lot of times I'm looking at, you know, these are three unique style codes, right? Like this one's got some art elements to it. This one's kind of more minimalist and like has these sort of geometric straight lines, and this one's kind of like this vintage sort of like gold chrome look.

Play from 0:47:35 8:88:88 0:47:35 Now, when you blend those, you'll get some really cool stuff cuz you get elements. Like you get the element of this cross here and like that illustrative style on his chin. You get like this sharp like gold vintage style look from this image here. We get some of the structure and the white and red coming from that image, so you can get that. Now, again, I weighted the gold here, this like sharp vintage gold, three times as much as I did these two, but we still got subtle elements. Now, if we went one by one by one here, we get a good mix of all of them. Like you get the illustrative style, you get this sort of minimalistic white and like black high contrast, you get some of this sort of gold vintage look on the armor, and on like his jewelry and things like that. As you play with it and you start to play with the weights, we go three by, you know, three three one,

0:47:47Brand Applications

Play from 0:48:22 8:88:88 0:48:22 we get a lot more crazy texture, we get this this cross kind of through. You can see as we start to blend these and play around with the weights, they all look radically different, but they can be really cool. So, So dope. Yeah, it's um, you know, the waiting to me is if you find three styles that have, you know, somewhat of elements that you like. They don't have to be like, I want all of this. It's maybe I want some of this and some of this, or I want some of this guy over here with the gold armor and some of this like little illustrative grunge style. That's how you can get the most out of those. Now, I will also say this.

Play from 0:48:56 8:88:88 0:48:56 This is just a hack now that I'm seeing it on my screen. I totally forgot about this. If you want to see what your style codes really look like, I use a mood board prompt. This is just a little hack. Basically, this prompt here, what I use it's a multi-panel mood board split into multiple images, including lifestyle images and color swatches. So, I'll just take that and put the SREF code in it, and then you can basically see what your style code looks like across a number of different images. So, you don't have to go and waste a ton of images. How does this look for a person?

Play from 0:49:27 8:88:88 0:49:27 How does this look for a flower? How does this look for XYZ? So, It'll give you a good Did you say little hack? Just a little one. Did you say like little like little like a little baby hack? little like a little baby hack. Bro, this is dope. What? So, it's sick, right? Yeah, so you can go and like kind of get an idea of what your style code is like at its core. And then it's like, oh, I get a bunch of different images. Like that's cool, more minimalist, right? This one's way more colorful and liquid.

Play from 0:49:54 8:88:88 0:49:54 You know, this one's got a lot of illustrations mixed with photo realism. a lot more efficient than running 10 different prompts with the same style code. Totally forgot about that. Good thing we Good thing we jumped on there. That was a Hey, I hope y'all stuck around for that because that is a great great unlock. I think that just changed my whole process when thinking about maybe how much time or how many prompts I'm spending, ones that I'm not sure about, either, right? Like Yeah.

Play from 0:50:20 8:88:88 0:50:20 You know, because you know, especially like Fast Hours, you don't want to wait a long time when you're trying to explore these two. I know I've been putting together like a a bunch of these carousels with like 10 styles that you should check out kind of thing. I mean, as I'm going through that, I'm eating up Fast Hours because I'm trying to run all these different kind of prompts to just kind of see how that's going to play out and see if it is like a worthy style code to show and share and that's that sort of thing. But I think that that is just such a speed up of that process. So, damn, love that.

Play from 0:50:54 8:88:88 0:50:54 I got tired of of of burning through my hours for the style codes. I was just like, you know, I got to figure out a smarter way than to do nine images of one style to see like where it goes from, you know, person to environment to product to this, you know, it's like, all right, let's just throw it all in one, see if it comes out. Does. Hey, you know, use that to your advantage, guys. That's that's your, you know, little money saver there if you stuck around to the end. What else about style codes? Is there anything else that you feel like people should know?

Play from 0:51:22 8:88:88 0:51:22 Yes, folders. There's a There's a way to There's a way to organize them because I know I'm bad and I get lost. You can create smart folders. We've gone over this before in the past, but typically like if you want smart folders and you want to either one keep specific codes together, you can filter it by code and keep the code in each little folder or if you want to just work on one thing to have all of your style codes in one place, use something like a standard prompt for your S refs, right? So, use like, I don't know, photo like photo of a ninja, and then use your S ref codes just always start with that one, so they all filter into it, and then you can filter a smart folder by, you know, the prompt photo of a ninja. I also do it in rooms, too, you know, there's Yeah.

Play from 0:52:07 8:88:88 0:52:07 there's rooms that are specifically that. Yeah, specifically for just generating style codes, so that I can just go back in there, you know, create your own personal room and go in there and do that. Cuz, you know, they get lost. If you if you're generating, like we are, just like I don't know, a couple hundred images a day, it's like, all right, I might never see that again. Might never come across it again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So much Also, you know, like one other cool thing I think worth mentioning if you're trying to find codes, cuz I've had this problem where, you know, I'm unlocking multiple style codes at the same time, and then again, like with that example where I unlocked 10 3D floating pyramid, I might want to run a different prompt on all 10 of those again. Just to get further clarification on do I like the style code? Now, your whole mood board

Play from 0:52:52 8:88:88 0:52:52 sort of effed this whole thing up. Thanks for that. But, at the same time, like you could copy and paste your {dash} {dash} S ref code and put that into your search tab, and you can also easily find all the ones that you've done that way. If you don't want to do a folder, or if you're just in the exploration phase of style codes, that's a that's a quick way to like just filter through them. If I'm like exploring multiple codes at the same time, and I don't don't want them to get lost.

Play from 0:53:20 8:88:88 0:53:20 Good point. Hey, half of this is organization, and I, you know, I just all this stuff is lost to me. My 99.9% of the images, I know where the good ones are that I really like, but the other stuff, you ever go back and you look at you find stuff from like a couple months ago, or maybe a couple weeks ago, and you're like, how did I overlook that? Cuz that seriously solid one. What did I What was I thinking? A a Nah. I I feel so bad that I don't go back past like 6 months now. You know, like to look at anything.

Play from 0:53:50 8:88:88 0:53:50 And I know there's good stuff sitting in there that I could, you know, try to rerun the prompt on 6.1 or take a style from or whatever it is. Yeah, it's it's unfortunate. They're just collecting dust. There's gems, man. There really is. I love I love looking back. Every once in a while when I'm doing like presentations or something, you know, I'll go back just deep to see if I can find something a little bit more tailored to what I'm talking about in the presentation. Maybe I already have an image like that. And I'll type in random, you know, some random thing like bull's eye or whatever and I'll pull up, damn, I did this in like V5.2 and it's dope. Like let me rerun this in 6.1, see what happens.

Play from 0:54:28 8:88:88 0:54:28 Then I waste time and procrastinate and don't get the presentation done cuz I'm like, oh this is so, you know, like a squirrel chasing a nut. But yeah, I mean, that's that stuff is just how many actual images there are just sitting there. It makes me upset that I'll never see some of them again. Yeah, I mean, organization is something they're going to have to circle back to. I know that's come up on office hours quite a bit. They know about that. Like that's something they know they need to update. But they do have bigger things on the agenda. They've sort of stressed that. I get that.

0:54:30Organization Tips

Play from 0:54:58 8:88:88 0:54:58 Yeah. But, right? Like that's that part of it it is getting overwhelming now because you you almost have to have a really good system in place and one that you haven't changed Mhm. to efficiently go back to past images. What I mean by that is like when I first started ranking or liking images, you know, that started when they had those five emojis, right? Where I was using like the far right one as a five-star, whereas I'd use maybe like a three as like a eh, like I don't really care for it. And you could sort by that. You know, and I thought that was a pretty efficient way to say, okay, these are my gems. So, anytime I want to do a carousel, anytime I want to do something that's for a project where I'm showing this externally, I'm going to go just to my fives. I want those are the ones I really want to use, maybe my fours.

Play from 0:55:40 8:88:88 0:55:40 And then, you know, that process sort of changed when they took that away. It was you can like an image, you can upscale an image, and you can sort by either, but I sort of changed my approach to, okay, every image I like, I'm going to upscale. And so I filter that way. The problem with that is, you know, that probably eats up a lot of extra time, sometimes Fast Hours that I probably don't necessarily need to use. Yeah. But that's how I filter through now to find the really good one. So, I say all that to say, like, organization is definitely a problem because we've all created great images that we forget about if you've been using Midjourney for any longer than 6 months, I would say.

Play from 0:56:18 8:88:88 0:56:18 Midjourney, also, if you're listening, hey, this just another request. If if sometime in the future, not saying right now, sometime in the future, we could have a reverse image search sort of feature in there, that would be great. So I could just take old images that I have from wherever, and I know I'm trying to find them. I don't remember the prompt. I don't remember when I did it, whatever. If I could just screenshot that, drop it into the search bar, and it would just be like, "Bing!" You know, come up with it in my folder of somewhere, or at least give me things that looked like it. That's just an idea. Just a really small one. We'll see.

Play from 0:56:48 8:88:88 0:56:48 I like that idea. Yeah. We'll test the waters. idea a little bit. Well, I mean, maybe the only other thing that we haven't really touched on is stacking Sref with something like image reference. Do you ever do that? What do you like how do you think about whether you use one or the other or both? Right? You can use both, and they do different things, but you also can use one or the other and kind of cross over this threshold where you can kind of treat image reference especially like a style weight to some degree because we talked about that at the beginning. It was sort of like a little bit of this loophole. How do you decide which direction you're going to go in?

Play from 0:57:26 8:88:88 0:57:26 Yeah. Most of the time it's depending on if I'm getting the structure correct. Let's just say I'm creating an avatar of myself, and I want to have myself, but I also want to have like a specific style. So, maybe I want it like in that style of that crazy face painted girl from earlier in the episode. I will put myself in as an image reference first, a picture of me, so I know it'll guide the construction and make it look like myself. Then I will also put the style reference in of maybe like that girl, and I'll either go on the low side or the high side depending on how much I want it to look like that. Image weight, we'll get into this probably in another episode cuz it it deserves its own one.

Play from 0:58:04 8:88:88 0:58:04 That one's gotten more sensitive, so probably, you know, like the point IW.5 through like 0.8. To me, typically keeps construction of the image or at least like the base details. Yeah. And then utilizing, you know, style reference of whatever other image I'm trying to utilize plus either a low style weight, like 50 through 90, or if I want a lot of it, I'm going up high. So, you know, 500, 600, 700. So, yeah, I do it all the time actually. I I love it. And then sometimes I'll just rip, you know, style and image prompt just to see what happens.

Play from 0:58:40 8:88:88 0:58:40 Yeah, same. Just click click all the buttons. Click all the buttons, run it. One other question, I think we answered this, but I This has come up a few times. Can you Can your brand create a style code? No. Your brand can create a style reference, right? We kind of talked about that. So, hopefully by now you've understood that style codes are something that has to be unlocked. It is random. You can't control it. There's no way to filter through or do anything like that. Now, you could go find like a third-party site. I'm sure somebody's done it. In fact, I think I may have seen it somewhere that they've compiled all these codes, and maybe they have an option to filter through some things.

Play from 0:59:18 8:88:88 0:59:18 Yeah. then you might be able to identify the a code quicker in that case, but again, you're going to have to go off platform for that. You're going to have to find that site if if exists. But that's one way you could go about doing it. Again, the faster way, at least right now to do that, is to take any style reference image or images and create it that way versus the code. Totally. Let me show this. We've done this for a long time with Midjourney. It's how do we how do we take one image and turn it into a thousand? Really is kind of like the idea. So, essentially, like if you're looking for a brand, right? Like we utilize Red Bull as an example here. We took this original image from Red Bull public domain site and then just to utilize this as an example. A lot of times, SRF works very well in combination with a text prompt. So, we'll take like this image, we'll run it

1:00:00Future Possibilities

Play from 1:00:06 8:88:88 1:00:06 through either describe or ChatGPT to pull out sort of like these categories, photo type, subject, action, environment, color scheme, lighting, composition, technical details, modifiers, right? Like technical details being like camera shot, like, you know, camera types, aperture, things like that. We can basically build like a form prompt. And really from there, what we're looking for is the color scheme, the lighting, the composition, technical details, and some of the modifiers.

Play from 1:00:32 8:88:88 1:00:32 So, this is like your brand of your image here. Then you can just change the photo type, the subject, and action in the text prompt and utilize this image as an SRF, and then you can build it out in any way you want. So, like we can take that image of the F1 car, then we can change it to be in a different position. We can, you know, change it into a skier, a motorcycle, a dune buggy, a race car or a dirt bike, whatever, while keeping the aesthetic because we're using the aesthetic from here. And that's where it can get really important. And then when you can really text prompt and you style reference, you can start to build out full, you know, visual storyboards. You can go from one thing to the next, right? This is all basically built Everything is built off of this image, this one image here.

Play from 1:01:17 8:88:88 1:01:17 You can go and create an entire story with one image. It's all based on style reference and text prompting. Same thing here, right? Like all based off one image of these boots, we can go and then build an entire story off of it. So, again, style reference is the is the unlock for consistency in branding, if you're looking to do that. You have to If you master it, you'll master keeping everything like super clean, super precise.

Play from 1:01:44 8:88:88 1:01:44 This was, going back to the original episode, and the inflection point of why Midjourney resonated so deeply with us and we became obsessed. Mine was discovering this in real time. This was pre-Sref, but working for a brand in a niche category, had no branding, no existing images in the niche that looked any good. How do you create visual representation or or visual signature, rather, of your brand without going into stock or hiring a photographer? You I mean, there was no option to do that.

Play from 1:02:17 8:88:88 1:02:17 And so, if you're trying to maybe think about using Midjourney for your brand, using a style reference like we're talking about, those are some great building blocks you just touched on. And for me, like when I was going through that process, it was thinking about who's our ICP? Like who's our ideal customer? What do they, you know, ideal customer profile? How old are they? What gender are they? What What ethnicity? What do they wear? Where do Where are they at? What locations? You know, what kind of lighting? And then, what kind of camera angles am I trying to utilize to tell different parts of that story?

Play from 1:02:51 8:88:88 1:02:51 And so, it was a lot more trying to build that from a text perspective, but if you've got brand guidelines, start there. Start identifying these things about like values that you represent as a company, some of the mood and characteristics of your brand, and start to build that out that way, right? So, you could start with a style reference, you can use that text modification and those variables to stack on top of that to arrive at something that's very unique and very much your own. And so that really is the unlock from a branding perspective because essentially what you can do is build this bottomless library of images that anybody in your organization could grab.

Play from 1:03:32 8:88:88 1:03:32 You know, anybody on your team. Like for me it was a marketing team, right? So if we're thinking about standing up social media, ads, blogs, emails, you know, slides, external slides, swag, which was part of the example that I that I gave in in episode one. You know, now anybody can have access and grab these images. I mean, just think about how much time that saves you. You don't have to scramble at the last minute of like, let me find the perfect image for this. And then it kind of looks like us. Now you've got this you've got this thing that you could replicate in perpetuity. And it is bottomless. And so I think that really is the unlock if you're thinking about this from a branding perspective that is huge for an organization or it's huge for a client. If you're an agency and you're thinking about this from a client perspective and you're going through some sort of brand redesign or brand

Play from 1:04:17 8:88:88 1:04:17 identity, this is this is a great example of how you could use it for that. 100% it's just creativity, right? It's whatever you need. You know, if I wanted to create that picture of Big Boy behind you, I could just screenshot this and use it as a style reference. And then bang, I have something very similar. Yeah. matter. It's awesome. It's so good. It is awesome. Yeah. Is there anything else that we want to cover with style reference, dude? I mean, we kind of banged through a lot. We hit a ton. I mean, again, I probably do this for 2 hours on just style reference alone cuz there's so many ways to go with it.

Play from 1:04:48 8:88:88 1:04:48 Yeah, I mean, we The other thing is we could just dig into more visual examples and really hold your hand through this. But hopefully, you know, this provides a solid foundation for both beginners and people that have already used this plenty of times. So hopefully there's some value to grab across the board. I think you know, where we go next, we still need to go into image reference, we still need to go into character reference. We've got 62 on the horizon coming up here.

Play from 1:05:15 8:88:88 1:05:15 Rory, I heard something the other day on office hours that they're not sure whether V7 or 3D's coming first. What? Woah. What? What? Yes. Holy. I saw Nvidia drop some crazy 3D stuff, so I don't know if they're like the pressure's on, but Hey man, you know, I've seen everyone always talks about the the hot wars, the competitions, right? Between all these image generators. Flux you saw just got introduced into Creaya for, you know, as their base image generator model. To me, Midjourney still allows for a level of creativity that's not available on other site. It's interesting. They just keep They just keep We said keep going their own direction. And if they're going to drop 3D, like, you know, game on again.

Play from 1:05:55 8:88:88 1:05:55 Again, every other week. No VC money, no investors, they don't have to go any way they don't want to. They can pivot on a dime. That agility is super important, I think, given this particular landscape because maybe these VC-backed companies, these larger companies, they want video. They want 3D. They want it as fast as possible. They want the hype train. All of those things. Midjourney really could keep focusing on these really unique aspects that none of these other ones have. Like we mentioned style reference, we mentioned personalization. Those are unique to Midjourney. Midjourney's got plenty of those things that give you those micro controls. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see what what happens and what comes out of that.

Play from 1:06:37 8:88:88 1:06:37 I have a feeling if we're looking at if you I don't know if you watched the video from Nvidia. I haven't. I just saw that carousel Nvidia video Nvidia video Nvidia video, but I can't say personalization or operationalization. Hard. Hard. Very hard. But I think it was very interesting the way they constructed it of like how you're going to be able to build within the world. It was like step-by-step. So I was, you know, I'm thinking in terms of how Midjourney's going to roll this out from like a UX perspective. And you know, looking at it and it's basically they were generating like an environment and then you were generating like individual things to put in the environment. So it was very like layer based and not necessarily like one shot prompt bang here's everything and then you can go control within it. It was like you were creating each thing piece by piece which

Play from 1:07:22 8:88:88 1:07:22 is more so along the lines of how I you know, traditional 3D design works. I mean there's way more layers attached to it than that, but I would think it could look like that or Midjourney could just flip it on her head and we could just generate an entire 3D scene and then go in and edit. So I don't know how it's going to look, but I'm excited for that one. You know, ruin my life for a couple weeks when it happens. Bro, I mean shut it down. I will take a take a staycation for a week when that happens. I will lock myself in this room and I'm just going to go in on 3D.

Play from 1:07:54 8:88:88 1:07:54 I mean to to have the ability to do that without any formal training Yeah. just is mind-blowing to me that that we're here right now. And obviously the competition, look, we love Midjourney. The competition speeds these things up. It raises the bar in terms of the quality that's that's the benchmark. So I think this is a good thing for all of us. Yeah, looking forward to it. I don't think video I don't know. I don't even know what it's going to look like at this point. You know, who I don't even know if they have to focus on it at this point. They probably do at some point, but I mean unless it's going to be as good as the stuff that's available now, I wouldn't be like using it to be quite honest. So it's it's interesting. I don't know how I feel about the video side of it yet

1:08:28Wrap-Up

Play from 1:08:41 8:88:88 1:08:41 unless they come out and just They got to be thinking about something at least a few steps ahead because by the time that it rolls out, it's going to evolve since then, right? So like where are those steps ahead? What does that look like? I mean the word they keep using or the phrase rather is open world simulation. Yeah. about that word coupled along with 3D in video, sounds pretty unique. Sounds like something we've never seen, probably never really imagined vividly before.

Play from 1:09:13 8:88:88 1:09:13 Which kind of again feels like one of those moments in time where it's just like I'm going to remember where I'm at when this drops. That village, let's put a pin in it. We'll see where it comes back. We'll we'll reference back to this episode when it happens. Let's do it. Yeah. Hey, anything else you want to say to these nerds before we get out of here? Appreciate you guys hanging out. Like and subscribe, please. All right, guys. We'll catch you in the next one. Have a great weekend. Awesome. Later, dude.