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Comment by celestialcheese | Hacker News Reader

If anyone wants to try it out without having to build and install the thing - https://replicate.com/prompthero/openjourney

I've been using openjourney (and MJ/SD) quite a bit, and it does generate "better" with "less" compared to standard v1.5, but it's nowhere close to Midjourney v4.

Midjourney is so far ahead in generating "good" images across a wide space of styles and subjects using very little prompting. While SD requires careful negative prompts and extravagant prompting to generate something decent.

Very interested in being wrong about this, there's so much happening with SD that it's hard to keep up with what's working best.

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I've been thinking that for months, but recently swung towards being more optimistic about SD again, everything midjourney looks midjourney while SD allows you to create images in any style. MJ really needs to get rid of that MJ style, make it optional as it's undeniably pretty, it's just becoming a little much.

But I still feel 2.x is somehow a degradation of 1.x, its hard to get something decent out of it. The custom training/tuning and all is nice (and certainly the top rain to use SD over MJ, many use cases MJ just can't do) but it should not be used as a band-aid for appearantly inherent shortcomings in the new clip layer (I'm assuming this is where the largest difference comes from, since the Unet is trained on largely the same dataset as 1.x).

What's SD? No one's said.

stable diffusion

Stable Diffusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion

To be fair that's the default style of MJ, you're seeing that a lot because most users don't take the time to add style modifiers to their prompts.

If you add qualifiers such as soft colors, impressionistic, western animation, stencil, etc. you can steer mid journey towards much more personalized styles.

Yeah, a lot of Midjourney images are very clearly Midjourney images. Does Midjourney have inpainting/outpainting yet? I admit it's the offering I've evaluated the least.

Midjourneys upscaled images to their current max offering look fantastic, that's for sure. My wife generates some really great stuff just for fun.

It has inpainting and scaffolding at least.

SD really shat the bed, and a bunch of projects appear to have stuck with 1.5.

MJ can emulate a lot of styles

https://github.com/willwulfken/MidJourney-Styles-and-Keyword...

MJ is easy to get started with and works well out of the box. SD is for those that want to do things that MJ can't like embeddings.

I think 2.0 has potential still, it works with textual inversion type models much better, which can kinda play nice with each other, so given enough of those I imagine you can get some cool stuff with it. I've also heard it does negative prompts much better, so those are less optional in 2.0

But yeah for now, all my custom models are 1.5 so I've yet to fully upgrade yet, most of the community seems to be doing similar at the moment.

Every midjourney image has the same feeling to it. A bit 1950s sci-fi artist. I guess it's just that it all looks airbrushed? I can't put my finger on it.

It's the science magazine article illustration look.

Sounds great

If Midjourney applies this to all their artwork then maybe it alleviates some of the ethical concerns (Midjourney then has a "style" independent of the training data)

But the style isn't independent of training data. If you don't feed Midjourney images in that style, it's not going to come up with it independently.

Yeah, I think Midjourney makes fewer unsuccessful images, but harder to get images that dont match their particular style.

I don't know if that was Midjourney's intent, but it seems like a smart approach. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone and generating quite a lot of ugly garbage, you get consistently good-looking stuff in a certain style. I'm sure it helps their business model.

Feels like it's the Instagram model for prompt-generated images.

Anyone can get a camera phone, take a picture and use some free software (e.g. gimp) to get great results in post-processing.

Most non-expert users though want to click on a few pre-defined filters, find one they like & run with it, rather than having more control yet poorer results (precisely because they _aren't_ experts).

I've played a lot with it lately and that just not true. If you play with styles, colors, angles, views you have a lot of control about how the imagine will look. It can emulate pretty much all mainstream aesthetics.

I think it's down to having a lot of feedback data due to being a service, SD has its aesthetics ratings, but I assume it pales in comparison.

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