How To Use Midjourney
From your first prompt to consistent, on-brand imagery.
Overview
Midjourney makes the most cinematic AI images on the planet — if you know how to prompt it. This guide covers your first generation, parameters that actually matter, and how to keep characters and styles consistent across a campaign.
Step by step
- 1
Subscribe and open the web app
Midjourney.com → subscribe → use the web editor (skip Discord unless you specifically prefer it).
- 2
Write your first prompt
Describe the subject, the action, the setting, the style and the mood. Example: 'a golden retriever puppy sleeping in a sunlit window, soft film grain, golden hour, cinematic, 35mm'.
- 3
Use --ar for aspect ratio
Add --ar 16:9 for landscape, --ar 9:16 for vertical/Reels, --ar 1:1 for social posts.
- 4
Lock a style with --sref
Take a generation you love, copy its style reference URL, and add --sref <url> to future prompts for visual consistency.
- 5
Lock a character with --cref
Same idea, but for character consistency across multiple shots.
- 6
Upscale and re-roll
Hit U1–U4 to upscale your favorite, or 'vary subtle' to keep the composition and try small variations.
Tips
- Stop writing 'beautiful, amazing, masterpiece' — wasted tokens. Describe the camera, lens, lighting and mood instead.
- Use moodboards in the web app to teach Midjourney your brand aesthetic.
- Generate at 2:3 for print and resize down — keeps detail crisp.
Common mistakes
- • Over-stuffing prompts with adjectives — Midjourney averages them and your subject blurs.
- • Forgetting --no for things you want excluded (people, text, watermarks).
- • Not saving great --sref URLs into a swipe file.