Stunning Midjourney Illusion Technique

hi everyone today I've got a really interesting mid-journey workflow for you to create really compelling Illusions and not those spirals that have been going around everywhere although I am also going to show you a technique to be able to attain those spirals natively within mid-journey okay Abracadabra let's dive in so I've always been a big fan of Illusion photography things like you know forced perspective or double exposure such as this image I believe this is called the other face of Paris or on the art side The Works of M.C Escher or the famous lemur de Peru uh which I know I just butchered so French speakers go ahead and yell at me in the comments and while mid Journey does have a pretty great imagination if you do just prompt it something like optical illusion at a aspect ratio of three two you get this which is cool it's not very Optical illusiony but you know it's neat but even trying to come up with something that resembles the poster to the 2005 film The Descent which was clearly inspired by Salvador Dali's photograph which I can't show here but you know you can Google but if you give mid-journey a prompt something along the lines of female figures forming the image of a skull it just does not get what you're looking for there are of course the usual tricks of image prompting but I think this technique unlocks a lot more creativity experimentation and ultimately will lead to a cooler result so the key to the whole thing is actually in very subtle I know it's like the least popular of the varies so let's start by just generating a skull so this is painting of a skull at an aspect ratio of 16 9. once you have your skull generated just hit the very subtle button make sure you leave the same aspect ratio otherwise things get really screwy so and I'm just going to prompt for a photograph of dancers and sure enough in just a few minutes we have these cool images um yeah they're really really pretty neat I will note that the illusion does tend to work best kind of the further away you are from it as you get closer to the image or have the image kind of blown up the illusion does fall apart a little bit but that is just part of you know Illusions now a helpful tip if you're running into issues where you're not getting anything near what you're looking for is to try to utilize the stop command for example here's an image that I rolled up in Full Resolution this is close-up painting of a green eye at 16 9 but when I ran a very on it with the prompt a landscape painting these were the results that I got which weren't really what I was looking for actually number three isn't too too bad but overall yeah this wasn't quite what I had intended so taking the same prompt but adding in a dash dash stop of 20 gives us kind of this blurry mess but if you had a very on to it where I gave it an additional prompt of surreal painting and we ended up with this which is pretty cool it kind of looks like the album cover of like a 70s prog rock band and trust me I know my 70s prog rock album covers so you can image prompt within your subtle vary for some pretty interesting results we're going to look at that in one second but first I wanted to show you a little bit of the rabbit hole that I went down uh via MC escher's relativity so I think we all know this piece it was obviously very influential to Christopher Nolan in Inception so I decided to use it as an image reference in mid-journey and then run it with just the prompt MC Escher and ended up with these you know relatively inspired by images I wanted to see what would happen if we ran a very of say New York City Streets on I think the prompt was photograph for New York city streets and we ended up with these which looked pretty cool I think they're kind of more in a very busy kind of Double Exposure style than a true optical illusion nonetheless I wanted to show these to you because I think they're kind of cool and definitely worth exploring further there were a couple more I would say not great results um they're interesting they're definitely leaning closer into Escher at this point but I wouldn't exactly call this either illusionary or very compelling so that led to the idea of reversing the sources so I took uh MC escher's relativity ran it as a describe to get four separate text prompts from mid-journey as we've learned describe doesn't give you an exact prompt that mid-journey understands but it does pull a number of keywords and tokens from the image that mid-journey might understand so now generating kind of a blurry mess this is a painting of a lamp at an aspect ratio of 3 2 with a stop of 40. uh generally you're going to want to experiment with stops between 20 and 50. for this I went with 40 we get very subtle and then added in one of mid Journey's describes based off of the MC Escher piece and that got us here which I thought was pretty cool it might have lost a little bit of the idea of the lamp but you can definitely see it is there and the overall structure of the piece has a very Escher inspired look to it so I felt that I was kind of on a roll with Usher so I generated this up this is close up photo of a model an aspect ratio of three two and then using another one of the described prompts I ended up with these images which were pretty awesome but I will say that the order in which you very definitely does play a large part in this whole process for example I ended up just writing the prompt that we got from the describe so taking that image and running a very subtle with the prompt a model's face which is what we generated our initial model face with we ended up with this monstrosity so yes these definitely do not work as an illusion they don't really work as images either they're actually fairly terrible but I very much like this technique because it gets you into the mode of experimentation and exploration one thing that I have noticed is that the results generally work best if you use a very simple iconography so don't use a lot of busy imagery in your initial image for example this was a photograph of a light bulb very very simple and my initial idea was to try to merge it with the painting of a wolf but uh yeah it didn't come out that impressive here were some other attempts you know you could see where it was going with the idea but it just really wasn't pulling it off uh interestingly in image number four that kind of gave me an idea though in that the wolf looks like it's kind of coming out of a campfire which led to these four Images which admittedly are still not great but once I reached here I really started to think about the concept and idea of a light bulb like what is it it's warmth it's light it's knowledge and that led me to a subtle vary of a man reading a book uh and while this is not a perfect image I do think that conceptually it is pretty solid now overall obviously there are some problems with this uh his hand is kind of a mess here and then the wrist and the ankle meeting is pretty awkward but I think overall the concept of it is really really solid uh and it's something that I didn't even know that I was looking for when I first started down the path with this light bulb I read it a few more times and got some pretty interesting imagery out of it uh for example this image where I don't know moths I guess moths I don't know why that book was really really old I guess and then there was this depressing classroom again with the mods I don't oh Moss to light I get that whole wow major dirty wow that just really blew my mind and I think really illustrates exactly what I like about this process so much is that when you're in this sort of intentional exploratory phase majority is just going to throw you some curveballs that you did not see coming so anyways I will say this is a very cool technique and very very much worth exploring you will end up rolling a ton of Duds but when it hits it will really hit so rounding out quickly with the spiral technique that's going around everywhere now the typical way that you would end up doing this is uh to use stable diffusion or you could go to a hugging face and use illusion diffusion HQ that has been super super slammed lately in fact anytime that I've tried to run it this is just a beach at Sunset with this kind of swirly pattern I continuously end up with errors because the server is just getting slammed but Chase lean over on Twitter developed a method of getting the spiral within mid-journey natively now this isn't quite as uh subtle as the standard stable diffusion version but I think it kind of has a cool look all of its own so in order to attain this you'll need to prompt a hypnotic spiral or whatever kind of kaleidoscopic shape you would like uh comma black and white Dash Dash style raw dash dash stylized zero and you should end up with something that looks like this now we're back again to very subtle now here's the trick is that apparently niji works the best so your prop style will want to be whatever you're prompting a dash dash niji dash dash style Scenic dash dash stylize 1000 your initial output won't look anything like what you are aiming for so you basically you're going to have to run that same very over and over and over again and it will eventually get there now I will say that I gave it a shot but I ended up kind of giving up around uh one two three I ended up giving up around 10 uh you know varies and upscales um and I got here so yeah you can see that it was coming along I just kind of got tired of doing it so it's an idea it's a way that you can get these spirals within mid-journey and again I do think that it kind of has a cool look all to itself at some point I'm sure that someone will release some kind of app where you can just put the spirals right on your mid-journey images uh like Insight face or Trace Journey but you know for now uh this is a way to make it happen so that's it for today I thank you for watching and I do thank our supporters for supporting my name is Tim [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Theoretically Media

Views: 26,250

Keywords: Midjourney, Midjourney Tutorial, Midjourney Illusions, Spirals, AI Art, Midjourney prompt tips, Midjourney Prompts, Midjourney techniques, AI Illusions

Id: YWnMyUyAF9w

Length: 9min 35sec (575 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2023