How to use Midlibrary to improve your Midjourney art
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Part 1. Why use Midlibrary?
At the heart of Midlibrary is a hand-picked collection of 4400+ Midjourney styles.
A style, or a style modifier, is a name, a title, a technique, or a combination of those that Midjourney “knows” from its dataset.
Why it matters? Because when you add said words to your prompt, for Midjourney—you refer to a specific style.
Notice how the outcome changes depending on the style modifier:
Part 2. How to add style modifiers to prompts?
There are (at least) two ways of adding a style modifier to your prompt—Basic and Optimal prompts.
Basic prompts are simple: by <artist's name>, or in style of <technique, genre, art movement>, etc.
Part 3. What are Optimal Prompts?
Although it's fast and straight-forward, this might not always work, especially with more complex prompts. You might notice, that adding a specific style modifier doesn't change the style of the picture in the way you want. Or the outcome doesn't match the original style.
In short, instead of writing <your prompt> by Arnold Bocklin, make a more artist-specific—Optimal—prompt: Arnold Bocklin's painting depicting <your prompt>, etc.
This little trick might significantly push your style modifier toward giving its best!
As you can see, adding an artist-specific context/medium shifted the result to a much more cinematic look. Optimal Prompts might not always work perfectly, but they definitely are worth trying!
Learn more
If you want to go in-depth and learn more about Optimal Prompts, check out our Guide
Part 4. How to find styles that match your creative vision best?
There are multiple ways to explore Midlibrary in search for styles, depending on your goals and how adventurous you are.
The main workspace of our Catalog is the All styles page. It is an advanced window into our collection, and a powerful tool to navigate it. It might look overwhelming at first, but, in fact, it's pretty straightforward.
Top part is your search and navigation dashboard, allowing you to sort and filter the Catalog in a variety of ways.
The main window is the Catalog itself—a grid of previews of various Midjourney styles. By default, they are sorted from A to Z (note, that artists' style are sorted by Family name). Let's take a closer look at style cards.
Each style is represented by its Midjourney sample, name, category and—in some cases—a set of icons.
If you like a certain sample and want to try the style with your prompt, simply click the style name—it will be copied to your clipboard.
Paste it into your Midjourney prompt, et voila!
Part 5. Making most of Midlibrary Catalog
The filter and search pane has basic, and advanced modes.
Basic mode displays some of the most essential information and controls. Here, you see what filters are applied at the moment, and the number of styles matching those filters.
Controls, available in the basic mode allow you to sort styles alphabetically, or by recency (since we are adding new styles every week, it's a great mode to follow the updates). You can also filter the grid by styles that belong to Public Domain, feature the Powerstyle award, or have Benchmarks. And you can combine those filters, too!
Finally, from here, you can search the Catalog by a style name. Or a part of it! Just start typing— the grid will be updating in real-time.
But the true power lies in the Advanced Filter panel. When open, it offers two types of filters: Categories and Features.
Categories are self-expalantory, so let's talk about Features. It is a set of 51 keywords that fall into six categories: Theme, Style, Technique, Subject, Color, and Cultures + Identities.
In the Advanced Filters panel, all Features are displayed as a single table of contents.
You can check one Category and any number of Features—as long as there are styles matching your combination. If a combination is unavailable, the filter that will leads to it will become unclickable.
Part 6. Exploring a style
Apart from copying a style's name, you can also click its preview, which will lead you to that style page.
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Its focus is on the style samples from different versions of Midjourney. The current default—V5.2—is shown first, but you can switch through different models by clicking their respective links.
If, in your prompt, you specify no details, and just type in the "clean" Basic prompt: by Tyrus Wong, or Ukiyo-e—Midjourney will return an image representing its purest vision of said style.
Different versions (models) of Midjourney "see" styles differently. Some times the variations are pretty drastic, making a style unique in each version:
You now have a functionality to compare samples from all of the contemporary Midjourney versions (and there are some hidden old-school gems, too!).
Then there are style details: features, assoicated with the style; the style's Optimal Prompt (again—click to copy!); Benchmark score, observations, and gallery; artist's bio/style description.
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Not all styles have those details, but we are constantly working on adding them to each entry in our Catalog.
After the style-related part, there is a “portal” to explore further: More styles from the same category, or Similar styles (avaliable for a part of the evergrowing Catalog).
Part 7. What is Midlibrary Benchmark and why it is important?
Midlibrary Benchmark is a special set of nine standardized prompts that allow you to see how a specific style "behaves" in different contexts and with various subjects: from sci-fi to fantasy, from portraits to architecture, and from flowers to mythical creatures.
Depending on the outcome of each prompt, we add 1 (success), 0.5 (semi-success), or 0 (a prompt failed to produce a unique result in this style) points to the style's Benchmark score.
Each style that was tested by the Midlibrary team has on it's page a mark against the style name: click to see this style's Benchmark gallery.
Part 8. More ways to discover Midjourney styles
Another important page for the Midlibrary Catalog exploration is the Midjourney Styles Classifier.
In a nutshell, it's the Catalog map, from where you can go to a specific category or feature page and see all styles that belong to this particular section. Navigating these page is almost similar with the All styles with two differences. On a category page Advanced filters will show you its subcategories, and on a feature page you won't see the features filter.
Another tool for discovering Midjourney styles is the Style Roulette. Available on most pages, starting from Home, it shows four random styles for you to explore.
For a more curated experience you can always go to the Tops page and check out our best styles compilations!
Finally, check out this cool—and more adventurous—way of exploring Midjourney styles: Midjourney Style Roulette.
Ask us anything!
If you have questions about Midlibrary, want to offer a collaboration, or suggest a feature—please, contact us via community@midlibrary.io.
