Midjourney CREF Deep Dive | Consistent Character Ultimate Guide | Midjourney v6 Tips

mid Journey recently rolled out another game-changing update with the much anticipated character reference feature character reference is similar to style reference but instead of matching a visual aesthetic provided by a reference image it tries to match the character this is great news especially for those of us working on storytelling with visual narratives where the same character appears in different scenes or outfits in this video I'll share everything from the basics to creating images with multiple reference characters so make sure you give this video a like And subscribe if if you haven't already and let's get started so let's start with the basics of how to use character reference first you want to type in your prompt then add the-- CF parameter a space and paste in the URL of the image that contains the character that you want to use if you're prompting on Mid Journey's website instead of on Discord I'll show you how CF looks on there in just a minute so whenever you include a character reference in your prompt mid Journey will try to generate results that visually match the appearance and likeness of that character character reference works best with images created by mid journey and it's not going to copy exact details like designs on clothing but it should roughly capture the overall visual characteristics of your character as you can see here with our pink-haired woman while mid Journey maintains her core look it doesn't perfectly recreate outfit details it's pretty good at keeping the color of the shirt by default but not necessarily the shirt style if you need more accuracy with details such as a shirt style you'll want to make sure that you include those details in in your text prompt one major benefit of using a character reference is the ability to place the same character into multiple scenes and poses here I'm using the same character reference but have placed her in a coffee shop at a party working on a laptop and standing in front of a white building so using CF makes it much easier to create visual narratives with the same characters in addition to C we can use the character weight parameter D- CW to control how closely it mid Journey adher to the clothing and sometimes hairstyle of the reference character character weight ranges from 0 to 100 with 100 being the default that tries to fully match the character's likeness and clothing when character weight is zero mid Journey Only locks onto the face allowing you to change clothing while retaining the character's facial features in this example my prompt includes the text blue shirt as character weight decreases mid Journey starts to ignore her outfit in the reference photo and pays more attention to the outfit that described in the prompt her face is still similar but her shirt changes so character weight Works differently from mid jour's other strength parameters such as style weight a lower character weight does not mean make a character that is less similar to the reference because mid Journey will always lock on to the face regardless of the character weight so you want to decrease the strength of the character weight from the default of 100 when you want to change a character's outfit or if you're having difficulty getting the character into a different pose if you're creating images through mid Journey's website you can use the CF and CW parameters just as I've shown here when you type your prompt into the Imagine bar you can also choose to upload a character reference by clicking the plus sign on the Imagine bar or you can drag and drop your image be sure to select the little person icon here so that mid Journey knows to use that image as a character reference if you're interested in learning more about creating images on Mid Journey's website please check the link to my video in the description below now that we've covered the basics of char character reference and character weight let's go through some different techniques and applications one of my favorite uses of character reference is transferring a character to different visual Styles you can prompt for stylized Renditions like an oil painting a vintage photograph or comic book art just because your character starts as an illustration or a photograph doesn't mean it has to stay that way with some creative prompting you can explore your character through vastly different style lenses and you don't necessarily need to include anything about the character in your text prompt in these examples I only described the style once a CF is defined mid Journey will aim to put that character in your results some of my favorite character references so far have been ones that I created using mid Journey's anime trained model nii and then transfer to a photographic Style with V6 if you want to try creating characters using nii just include the parameter -- nii after your text prompt in addition to maintaining character similarity with CF you can take things to the next level by combining character reference with mid Journey's style reference feature if you're not familiar with style reference I highly recommend checking out my srf deep Die video style reference lets you use a reference image to define the overall artistic style and color palette that mid Journey should apply to your results combining a character reference with a style reference allows you to not only keep a similar character across image Generations but also a similar visual style it's a great approach for increasing the visual cohesiveness of scenes that you're trying to convey you can try using style reference images to apply a cinematic movie Style with teal orange color grading an abstract geometric style or a specific illustration style you can even use the same image as both a character reference and a style reference style reference is a very powerful feature and it's probably my favorite mid Journey feature which makes it really fun to combine with character reference character reference isn't just limited to human subjects you can use any image as your C in put including nonhuman characters or even abstract patterns and shapes here I gave mid Journey a cute little monster as a character reference midy was able to pick up on the core shapes and features of the reference now it's not going to give you an exact copy of the character but the reference image is a great guide some types of non-human characters are going to have more consistent results than others but I think the fun part is just experimenting taking it a step further here I used an abstract image and let mid Journey make up a character from there when you use an abstract image like this mid Journey will translate those warped forms and textures into new character-like entities which I think can look pretty unique and imaginative so far we've focused on using character reference for a single character but what about scenes with multiple characters this is where it gets a bit trickier let's keep it simple and use this image of Two Friends Meeting for coffee as our reference and then create new images showing both characters one approach is to use the entire two character image as the character reference however to to prevent mid Journey from blending the characters or choosing one face over the other we need to help mid Journey map the characters correctly by including descriptive text in the prompt that specifies each character and their positioning here I've highlighted some key phrases that I use to do this and here's one of the image results this method isn't foolproof I did still get several images that had the characters Blended together or where both people in the image were the same person so it does take a bit of experimenting a second approach is to use mid Journey's pan feature first I cropped the original reference image to just contain the woman and put her in a fashion photo shoot I also dropped the character weight to zero so that mid Journey gave her different clothing then I clicked this arrow button to pan to the right I replaced the woman's character reference URL with one containing the man's character reference I also modified The Prompt text to describe the new character and here's the result not too bad you can get similar results with custom Zoom as well here I clicked custom zoom and again then updated the prompt text and replaced the woman's C URL with the man's URL I also changed the aspect ratio and zoom amount so that mid Journey had more space to work with here's one of the results pan and zoom won't always work this well one of the downfalls is that it can be difficult to control the relative size differences between multiple characters as you can see in this result lastly the very region method lets you generate a base image with or without a character reference and then use VAR region to SW swap in each character's face here I created an image in which I described the two characters but I did not use a CF in the prompt then I used very region to replace the man's face during the very region I added his image as the C and modified The Prompt text to remove any mention of the woman I upscaled one result and then did the same thing to swap in the woman's face after a few iterations Here's the final image that I chose so what makes a good character reference for best results you want to use a character reference image that was made by mid Journey using non-id Journey images can lead to more Distortion and inconsistencies especially with facial features ideally your character reference should have a clearly defined subject with distinct facial features visible the more that mid Journey has to guess the less coherent your results will be portraits and full body Images tend to work well it can also help to have the character in multiple poses such as a front portrait side profile or action pose you can then choose which image to to use based on the scene that you're prompting for or include multiple CF URLs to reinforce key details just separate each URL with a space if you're having difficulty getting a character into different poses try lowering the character weight down to 50 or 60 this can help free up body movement and the results or you can paste an image URL at the beginning of your prompt that shows the character in the pose that you want image URLs that are placed at the beginning of a prompt are called image references there are a lot of ways to use image references and in the context of C they can be helpful for guiding character pose and composition there are many nuanced techniques to explore with character reference and experimentation is the key to finding the right workflow for your needs mid Journey's character reference is yet another feature that opens up more creative possibilities while it's not perfect I think it's pretty good for a first version I hope you enjoyed this video and found it helpful let me know down in the comments if you try out any of these techniques have questions or want to share any other character reference tips please make sure to give this video a like subscribe all the things thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Woollyfern

Views: 6,521

Keywords: midjourney consistent character, midjourney tutorial, midjourney v6, ai art, midjourney ai, midjourney v6 tutorial, midjourney update, midjourney tips, midjourney, woollyfern, woolly fern, woolyfern, wooly fern, consistent character, ai tutorial, midjourney v6 prompts, how to use midjourney, midjourney tricks, cref, midjourney cref, character reference, midjourney character reference, --cref

Id: BOgqKKRT7IE

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2024