Less is More: Improve prompts with Midjourney's Shorten

Plus useful and timesaving tools

Heather Cooper

Aug 06, 2023

Total reading time is about 3 minutes.

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Welcome to Visually AI!

It’s been an interesting summer and this week was busier than usual in my personal and professional life.

I didn’t have much time to focus on the latest generative AI developments because I was deep into Midjourney course development for upcoming classes.

So, I’m trying something different this week with a Midjourney tutorial for using the /shorten feature. If you don’t use Midjourney, you can still benefit by reading this to see which keywords and filler words contribute to the final result.

Midjourney Shorten tutorial

Midjourney’s /shorten feature is useful for building better prompts by eliminating unnecessary words.

It saves time to generate images with styles, colors, and themes you prefer and helps you know which keywords and phrases to use in future prompts.

Let’s begin.

Enter the prompt you want to shorten:

Type “/shorten”
Paste the prompt:

“a colorful drawing in an abstract style of sunrise, in the style of futuristic landscapes, graphic design-inspired illustrations, vibrant neo-traditional, metropolis meets nature, streamlined design, flat perspective, saturated pigment pools”

Press “enter”

Find out which words are the most important with the estimated weight of each word.

Click “Show Details”

Now, we know which words matter to the algorithm for this particular prompt. If we want to generate an image with this prompt, we can focus on those words.

But we don’t have to create a prompt from those words because Midjourney does it for us. It’s simple - click the number of the shortened prompt you want to try.

I usually start with the first one. Save time by customizing the dimension for the intended purpose.

This is a landscape image, so I would use landscape orientation for a wide view or portrait for a cell phone wallpaper.

You can do this by adding the aspect ratio to the end of the prompt, just like it shows you in the GIF below.

Add aspect ratio for landscape (—ar 16:9) or portrait (—ar 9:16):

Repeat this process for each shortened prompt.

Here are our results:

Shorten 1

Shortened Prompt: colorful drawing in an abstract, sunrise, futuristic landscapes, metropolis, nature, streamlined, flat perspective, pigment pools --ar 16:9

Shorten 2

Shortened Prompt: colorful drawing in an abstract, sunrise, futuristic landscapes, metropolis, nature, perspective, pools --ar 16:9

Shorten 3

Shortened Prompt: colorful drawing in an abstract, sunrise, futuristic, metropolis, nature, pools --ar 16:9

Shorten 4

Shortened Prompt: drawing, sunrise, futuristic, metropolis, nature --ar 16:9

Shorten 5

Shortened Prompt: sunrise, metropolis, nature --ar 16:9

After reviewing the results for the shortened prompts, we can choose the ones we like and develop them further or use the new shortened prompts.

Your results will look different each time you re-roll or remix.

I re-rolled #2, and the results are completely different:

I’m excited to participate as a speaker at the Artificial Conference in Los Angeles!

Joined by a team of talented creators, I look forward to teaching you how to use AI for visual storytelling with Midjourney.

Purchase in-person or virtual tickets here: Artificial Conference

🚀 This Week’s AI Tools

Leap AI: Multi-purpose platform lets you add AI to your apps with no coding necessary. Generate images, text, models, and music with text prompts. (link)

i💙IMG: Fast, free editing tool for image cropping, adding watermarks, compression, conversion, and a cool meme generator. (link)

Squoosh: I use this frequently for quick image file compression - helpful for certain platforms & 3rd-party tools with max file size limits. (link)

ImagineApp: Now has SDXL 1.0 and advanced audio reactivity. Mobile is available on iOS and Android. (link)