Combining Midjourney's Panning and Zooming for Complex Compositions

In this newsletter, you’ll find

• 🤓 A Comprehensive Midjourney Guide

• 🕵️‍♀️ Midjourney Pan Feature

• 🗞 News and Top Reads

• 📌 AI Art Tutorial: Panorama Videos

• 🎨 Featured Artist: Anna Dart

• 🖼 AI-Assisted Artwork of the Week

Midjourney Guide

🕵️‍♀️ Midjourney Pan Feature

The recently added feature in Midjourney now allows users to expand their images in multiple directions. Moreover, it is now possible to modify the prompt while extending an image, thus incorporating new subjects and objects into the composition. This offers users an unprecedented level of flexibility and control over the final image's configuration. In this post, I will briefly introduce the Pan feature and then provide an example of a workflow that enables you to make the most of this feature.

Introduction to Image Panning

After generating a new image grid and then upscaling an image of your choosing, you will notice arrow buttons below the upscaled image. By clicking an arrow, you can expand your image in the corresponding direction. To enable the option of modifying your prompt while extending an image, ensure that Remix mode is activated. You can access it through the /settings command.

There are several good news regarding this feature:

• You can keep panning multiple times.

• If you start panning your image horizontally, you can continue extending it in both horizontal directions (left and right). Similarly, if you extend your image vertically, you can keep panning up and down indefinitely.

• And the best part – as you pan out your image, Midjourney will keep extending it with the resolution becoming very large.

Unfortunately, there are also a few limitations:

• As of now, it’s not possible to control the amount you pan with each panning operation.

• You cannot pan both horizontally and vertically on the same image (unless you employ a specific technique that I will demonstrate in the exemplary flow below).

• You cannot have variations on panned images.

• If you zoom out on a panned image, its resolution will decrease back down to the default.

Now let’s see how we can use this Pan feature in our image creation process.

Image Creation Flow with Panning and Zooming

In this example, I will demonstrate how to combine image panning and zooming to expand an original image in all directions and create a final image with a complex composition. Please note that panning is still an experimental feature and may produce unexpected results. If you wish to add very specific subjects or objects to your image while extending it, you may need to attempt multiple times. Now, let us begin our thrilling experiment!

To start with, I have generated a close-up image of a beautiful and unique princess.

Then, I extended the image down without changing the prompt:

Next, I use Custom Zoom to introduce a new prompt and make an image square.

And surprise, surprise – now we can expand an image in any direction. Making an image square allows one to switch panning from vertical to horizontal and vice versa. It's not without its downsides – as mentioned earlier, zooming reduces the image resolution back to the default.

Now, let's expand the image towards the right and incorporate a majestic white wolf into it. I use the following prompt while panning.

Next, I want a magical white tree to the left of our mystical princess. So, I use the following prompt, while panning to the left.

Next, I again use Custom Zoom to make an image square. Make Square would also work here as I’m not changing the prompt.

As you can see, this zooming resulted in both upward and downward panning of the image. I believe this adequately covers the vertical extension. However, it appears that the image would benefit from a horizontal extension to achieve a more complete composition.

Instead of using image panning, I will utilize Custom Zoom to adjust the aspect ratio to 16:9 while maintaining a zoom value of 1. This means there will be no additional zooming except for what is necessary to change the aspect ratio. By doing so, we can expand the image to the right and left simultaneously, ensuring a consistent composition throughout.

And this is our final image! Of course, there is always room for further experimentation and improvement. The latest Zoom Out and Pan features in Midjourney are incredibly enjoyable to use, to the point where you may unknowingly spend all your precious hours engrossed in them. However, you also obtain fantastic images that (almost) accurately depict your desired subjects in desired locations. That's definitely a great deal! 😅 

Happy Prompting!

🗞 News and Top Reads

• Stable Foundation released SDXL Bot on their Discord server. You can not test image generation there with a random set of parameters to help the company choose the #1 candidate for the big SDXL 1.0 release.

• Shutterstock emulated Adobe's approach and recently declared that it would provide complete indemnification to its enterprise clients for the licensing and utilization of generative AI images on its platform. This measure aims to safeguard them from any potential legal claims arising from their use of these images.

  • In other news, the company expanded its partnership with OpenAI, committing to providing high-quality training data for another 6 years.

📌 AI Art Tutorial": Panorama Videos

In this concise 3-minute tutorial, Julian van Dieken demonstrates how to create panorama videos using the image generated with the Midjourney Pan feature. Discover the incredible potential of your images and create mesmerizing stories that will captivate everyone.

🎨 Featured Artist: Anna Dart

Anna Dart is an acclaimed multidisciplinary artist who advocates for cultural, ecological, and social sustainability by merging traditional art with new technology and the Metaverse. She is a guest artist at the digital fashion house The Fabricant, Picasso Museum in Barcelona, SINGULART gallery, Superchief Gallery NFT, and on SuperRare.

In “Fu Mar AI”, Anna Dart mixed her watercolor painting from 2012 with the power of generative adversarial networks to create a mesmerizing and innovative fusion of traditional art and artificial intelligence.

🖼 AI-Assisted Artwork of the Week

In celebration of the recent release of Threads by Instagram, see how to effortlessly incorporate threads into your wardrobe. Check out @julian_ai_art for more threads-wearing ideas. 😆 

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