It's only fair to start this post by mentioning I'm not yet a subscriber to Midjourney, this though I've been experimenting with generative ai-imaging apps for well over a year now and in fact several months ago completed a novel, And What If, that's fully illustrated with ai imagery and is currently available for free download.
If I've chosen up to now to work with apps - principally Stable Diffusion, DALL-E2, and Lexica - other than Midjourney its primarily because these, unlike Midjourney, offer at least some free tiers of use, and I thought it prudent to keep my costs down while gaining some proficiency in ai imaging. That being said, it's become obvious to me as I've studied any number of ai-generated creations that no other app I've come across can compare with Midjourney in terms of artistry and photo realism. It really is in a class by itself.
I was very excited then to learn today that Midjourney has released a new version of its app, v. 5.2. From what I've read, the new version contains several new features, but the most interesting by far is the "zoom out" which promises to widen an image's field of view and in this sense seems somewhat similar to Adobe Photoshop's new Generative Fill feature as well as Stability AI's Uncrop.
V5.2 contains other enhancements which, if not quite as exciting as "zoom out," are nevertheless well worth mentioning. One is a "make square" command that allows a user to turn a rectangular image into one in square format. Another is a "shorten" command that will analyze a text prompt and determine which words therein are given most weight in generating the final image.
I had intended to spend the summer in working only with photography, my stock in trade for almost fifty years now, but the new improvements to Midjourney are striking enough that I believe I will soon put my camera aside for the time being and begin subscribing to the app in order to see exactly what types of ai imagery I can create with it.
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