Jun 42 min read

So Random: Tuned Styles from Midjourney

This post is simply a showcase of some of the tuned styles that I have discovered using the AI image engine Midjourney. It's an attempt to share these amazing little beauties, these styles that never cease to deliver aesthetically satisfying and, often, surprising results. I'll also describe how I find these styles (a very simple process) so that you can find your own.

First of all, though, what is a tuned style? Midjourney allows you to use a feature called the "Style Tuner," a method for creating an aesthetic style that can be applied to prompts and/or images. From the official Midjourney Documentation:

"Personalize the appearance of your Midjourney images using the Style Tuner. Use the /tune command to generate a range of sample images showing different visual styles based on your prompt. Choose your favorite images, and you'll receive a unique code you can use to customize the look of future Jobs. Share your Style Tuner and Codes with others to share, explore, and experiment with different aesthetics. /tune and codes are only compatible with Midjourney Model Version 5.2" (ref)

I've tried tuning my own styles with some mixed success. The problem I always run into is that style tuning in this way uses up fast hours on the AI, and my middling subscription only gives me so many fast hours per month. Fortunately, it's possible to randomly access the tuned styles made by other people by using the commands "--style random" and "--v 5.2". These can be applied to a text-only prompt as well as to image references. An example of a text-only prompt could be as simple as:

noir --ar 3:2 --v 5.2 --style random

...where "noir" could be any word or series of words, "ar" is the aspect ratio (width x height) "v" is the version of Midjourney being used, and "style random" fetches and applies a random style that has been tuned by another user. As far as I know, there is no way to find out who created a particular style - it's like a big anonymous and randomized pool of them.

Running a prompt with the "style random" command will produce results that are associated with a unique code, e.g., "style cmH1pgFbn9IoSnmm." When I'm at a creative impasse or simply don't have any new ideas that require developing, I will often spin this random style wheel repeatedly and note the style codes of results that ring my aesthetic bell. Doing this can be quite meditative, with results in their different styles flowing by until something jumps out at me.

The following gallery shows some of the diversity of this approach, as all images were produced with the prompt "tragic neo-noir --style random --ar 4:5--v 5.2"