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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, before we start today's show, if you want to accelerate your AI learning, I have a solution for you. Become a member of our AI Business Society. You'll join me as we go deep with live AI training each and every month. Imagine crafting more persuasive content, creating stunning images and automating those time consuming tasks. It's all possible when you join the AI Business Society. Go to socialmediaexaminer.com AI and join today.
- [00:41]
Marshall Atkinson
Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [00:53]
Michael Stelzner
Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to use AI. Before we get started with today's show, I just want to thank you for being a listener. I know this is coming out at the end of the year and the beginning of a new year, 2025. Just super grateful that you have joined me on this journey to learn all about AI technology. Today I'm going to be joined by Marshall Atkinson and we're going to explore Mid Journey and really how to put it to work. And this guy is really knowledgeable on Mid Journey. If you want to create really advanced AI images, I think you're going to find today's show absolutely fascinating. And if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us on whatever platform you're listening on so you do not miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Marshall Atkinson, helping you simplify your AI journey.
- [01:59]
Marshall Atkinson
Here is this week's expert guide.
- [02:03]
Michael Stelzner
Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Marshall Atkinson. If you don't know who Marshall is, he is a Mid Journey expert and business coach who helps creative entrepreneurs monetize their craft. His YouTube channel can be found at idjourneyexperience. He's also got a great newsletter at midjourneyexperience.com Marshall, welcome to the show. How you doing today?
- [02:25]
Marshall Atkinson
I'm doing awesome. Thank you so much, Mike, for having me. I'm sort of thrilled to be here to talk about one of my favorite things. Right now I have a little bromance going with Mid Journey and so I love talking about it and can't wait to let everybody know why.
- [02:41]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, well, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about how to succeed with it and Marshall's the man. Now, before we start Marshall down that fascinating journey, I want to talk about your story. How'd you get into Mid Journey and AI images and all that fun stuff? Start wherever you want to start.
- [02:55]
Marshall Atkinson
Well, you know, like everybody does. You see something and you start playing with it. And I. I had a Mid Journey account, but it wasn't until I went to the Content CeX Expo in Cleveland a couple years ago when there was a guy who was giving a presentation on Mid Journey and was talking about it.
- [03:17]
Michael Stelzner
It was Brian Fanzo, right?
- [03:18]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, Brian Fanzo. Right. I was sitting there in the audience, and I was at what he was doing, and I was like, wow, that's really great. You know, I'm a former art director. I have a degree in art. You know, I'm an artist. And I was really digging what he was putting out to everybody, and I'm like, I should really play with this more. And then the next thing that came along was, does everybody know about this? And so, sitting right there in the audience, you know, there's like 1200 people there or whatever. I pulled up my phone and I Googled Mid Journey newsletter. And I don't know if you've ever Googled anything where you get nothing. Like, there's zero response. It was nothing. There was nothing there. And I said, aha. So that night in the hotel room, I went and I wrote a business plan, and I got everything going for the newsletter right that night and started right then. And it's been kind of a whirlwind journey to not be funny about it, because it was Mid Journey. I really love it, and I experiment every day. And what I really love doing is teaching people why you should really be looking at this stuff and how you can use it, especially if you're a creative professional or doing anything where you're constantly having to create images for whatever you do in your life.
- [04:41]
Michael Stelzner
So tell a little bit of your backstory and your. Your history from an artistic perspective just so people have that context.
- [04:47]
Marshall Atkinson
I went to Florida State University. I graduated a long time ago. I do photorealistic watercolors. That's kind of my j. So I know how to draw and paint. You know, it's not like I'm using this tool because I can't. I'm using this tool because I'm achieving an end. Right. I'm a former art director. I do graphics. I still do them. I still do freelance stuff. And this is a tool that I've found really helps you get to the finish line faster. Than ever before. Because here's what it is. It's. You're still you. You're still your thought process, your creative process. What you need, let's say you need a. Because you're doing something for a design. You need an element, you need a background, you need a texture and a couple word prompts. And about 20 or 30 seconds later, you have exactly what you need to use for somewhere else instead of using stock images or any of that stuff. And that way it's curated for exactly what you're doing and it has kind of your mental creativeness that goes along with it. So that's what I think. It's really sticky right now. And that's the reason why I know that a lot of creative professionals and architects and industrial designers and people who are actually doing things creatively are using tools like midjourney to make their work go faster and achieve a better result.
- [06:14]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so you started a YouTube channel and a newsletter. Tell us a little bit about what you've been doing over the last year with that.
- [06:21]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, so my whole direction is there's creative professionals. I'm a former art director and I know what it's like to have deadlines. I used to have to create six to eight of the best looking T shirt designs you've ever seen every single day. Okay. So it's really hard to think about that stuff and be creative and have a whole bag of tricks that really help me do that. But you know what, if you need a camel or if you need a mahogany wood grain texture, you're going to the Internet to find this stuff. And now instead of using somebody else's, whatever they did, I can create something that's just for me, that's applicable for just what I want to do with the right texture and color and all the other stuff I want, because I can put those word prompts into mid journey. So I get the result that I want that matches what's in my mind's eye to use for that project. And that's what I teach.
- [07:20]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. So explain a little bit more. Like on your YouTube channel, you're regularly putting out videos on what you discover and tell us about what you're doing there.
- [07:27]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah. So I try to pay attention to what people are talking about and I try to think about this type of project. It's a logo, it's a background texture, it's a way to do editing. So I show people how to do this stuff. So my newsletter has four different segments, every single issue, and those are all covering different things. And then I use my YouTube channel to show these ideas to people with video because it's. You can write about it and you can show one or two pictures, but when you do a video, it really explains it better because I'm talking over as I'm doing the work. And that helps you connect the dots with what I'm trying to teach you. Because some of this stuff, frankly, gets a little complex if you're not used to it.
- [08:15]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so you mentioned that you are an art director and you also are designer. And there are lots of marketers and creators listening to this podcast. And some of them are creative. Some of them have that art direction background like I do, or maybe they're designers. And what is it that Mid Journey could make possible for them that. I know you hinted a little bit at this, but why should they pay attention to Mid Journey?
- [08:41]
Marshall Atkinson
Well, the reason I like Midjourney the best is just because it's trained over a bigger set of images. So, you know, you could use like Photoshop has their own AI, but it's trained on the Adobe Library, which is. It's a limited set. Midjourney is trained basically on images that are on the Internet. So it's just trillions of images. So I think the results are better. And the images that you get, that it just looks more refined. You can't tell that that's an AI image. You know, I know you've seen stuff that you go, obviously that's a right. Just because it looks like it's AI, Mid Journey, I think, gives you better results. So you can't tell what that came from. And it looks unique. And that's what's really great about it. So what I try to cover with what I'm doing is those tips and tricks and that type of stuff. I use that in my own work. And I think for anybody that's out there that creates social media backgrounds or needs something, or they need an illustration for a blog article or a book cover or a video thumbnail, or they are doing something with a newsletter. Or if you're that type of creator and you're using this stuff, these are the things that can really help you arrive at a look that's uniquely yours that shows what you're doing to the best of your ability to create the image with kind of how you think creatively. So everybody has a different way of talking and singing and designing. And sometimes I talk about, you know, designing in your own voice. So what is that? So you like things to be realistic or cubist or bright colors or monochrome or whatever. Mid Journey has a space for you. And you can start creating so it looks like it came from you because of the way that you're doing things and the words you're using and that you can edit and do all that stuff. And then it helps you get to where you want to go faster. But you got to learn how to drive the car. Right. That's the trick is how do I get get to that point and like anything you have to learn. Right. And so everything I'm doing is about teaching people this stuff so they can get to where they want to go faster by just flattening the curve, if you will.
- [10:58]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And a lot of folks that are listening to this podcast might only have experienced Dall E3 images via ChatGPT. And I'm here to tell you that almost all those images have a certain kind of look to them and like, you can spot them once you've seen one. You kind of know it was generated through ChatGPT by Dolly. But I will tell you, with Mid Journey, everything that I've seen, the pure variety of different kinds of work, like illustration versus photorealistic versus almost Pixar style, I mean, there's a lot is there not Marshall to what you can generate?
- [11:32]
Marshall Atkinson
It's unbelievable. And here's the thing, if you don't believe me, a thing to do is to look me up on Instagram. My name, Marshall Atkinson. I share practically every day something I've created in Mid Journey. I'm always experimenting. I'm always playing around with things. And if you look at something, it's a boat scene, it's a monkey, it's a background texture. Just completely forget about what the subject is. What I'm playing with are the words that are modifying that subject somehow. And you'll notice that I'm using really weird words. I'm using a string of numbers or something. Those are the things that I'm playing with to get the outcome that want. Because I'm constantly testing myself and trying different ideas and challenging myself. Like, not too long ago, I wanted to do something that was a design that was in a round shape, but I didn't want to use the word circle or round. How do I achieve that? With prompting. And I came across an Italian Renaissance word, tondo, T o n d o, which means round. Right. And when I use that, I got exactly what I wanted. And so that's the fun part. It's kind of a puzzle, is figuring this stuff out about how you can get something better and Believe me, a thesaurus is your best friend on some of this stuff. Because, you know, you could say minimalistic, you could say spartan, you could say simple. All those could give you a slightly different result. Which one works best? That's the fun part about this.
- [13:11]
Michael Stelzner
Okay. It's probable that someone listening right now either knows someone or they are that someone who's really concerned that AI art is plagiarism. What do you want to say to those people?
- [13:21]
Marshall Atkinson
Well, first off, it's not copy and paste. That's not how it works. So it's a algorithm, it's math. Okay. And what it does is when you put it in a prompt, blue, right? It's trained on images that are blue. When you say horse, it's trained on images that are horse. When you say cartoon, is train. Images that are cartoon. When you put blue, cartoon, horse, it's taking those three words and converting it to a math formula. And it starts off with random noise and the algorithm converts all that stuff into an image. So it's not copying and pasting something. So it's not going to be plagiarism. It's been inspired by. By all those images that are on the Internet. There's trillions of them. Okay. But it's always making unique image plagiarism is that we're using the exact thing, right? And so I just think it's. It's the inspiration from things. And, you know, if you think about how art is studied, you know, when we go to a museum, you've probably seen people sitting there with a sketch pad drawing the painting. Okay? You're being inspired by that painting, you're learning from that painting. It's kind of the same thing, you know. And so to me, can you use copyrighted material? Of course you can. Ethically, you know, if you type in Mickey Mouse, you're going to get Mickey Mouse, but that doesn't make it right. I personally don't use names of artists or any of that stuff when I do stuff. And so that's because that's just how I am. It has the ability to do that. And could you get in trouble? Possibly. But what I think about it just in general shakes, is that it's just trained on everything that's out there and it's using it to produce new images, and that's how it works. So for me personally, I think it's okay. But, you know, it's going to be legislated through the courts more than anything, but I think they're probably on the side of it's. Going to be okay. And so that's kind of how I feel about it. I don't know. Did I answer your question? I kind of talked around a little bit. Yeah.
- [15:27]
Michael Stelzner
No, no, totally. I mean, I'm with you. Every single time you generate something in Min Journey, it's never been generated before, but it has been inspired by things that it is consumed. Just like an art student studies art, this thing studies all the different kinds of art that's out there and it can do things in certain kinds of styles, but it's going to be different every single time. So it's learning from it. And that's the big debate, Right. Is learning considered copyrightable? And that's obviously something beyond this discussion today. But it is absolutely original art that you're getting out of Mid Journey. No one has ever seen that piece of art before. Is that fair to say?
- [16:05]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, well, you could do a Google Reverse lookup and it won't. You won't find it.
- [16:09]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, absolutely.
- [16:10]
Marshall Atkinson
You'll find similar things. Right. But similar is not exact. Right, Correct. But you think about how all art, you know, what has come before us, right? And a lot of people, to me are scared of this stuff. Artists are scared of AI image creation because. And I'm an artist, so I get it, right? It's because we've lost our magic superpower a little bit. If you can create something that it took me a whole lifetime to learn how to do, I don't like that. I totally understand that and I get that. Right. But that doesn't diminish that you have that skill and I don't. Right. That doesn't diminish that. It just means that this is another tool that we can use for creativity. And I want you to think back to when photography was invented. When photography was invented, all of the painters who spent a lifetime learning how to paint said, this is the death of art. Okay? Now, what happened was photography became its own art form, right? And it's going to be the same with. This is just a tool, right? You can use this as a tool. You can upload images that you've created or sketched or painted or whatever, and then you can modify them. You could have Mid Journey learn from that. You could be doing your own thing, and then out comes a different result because it's the process of the intake and the output. That's what art is a lot of times anyway. And so this is a really fascinating thing because it is so new. It's only two years old, right? So where we go with this is going to be really super interesting.
- [17:50]
Michael Stelzner
100%. Okay. When we were prepping for this, you shared a couple of examples. One about a haunted house and another one about industrial designers. I would love you to just share those examples for everybody so they can understand some possible business applications here.
- [18:05]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah. So one of the great things about using Midjourney is that you can have your own texture library that you've invented. So it's colors, its shapes, its textures, its forms, its patterns. And we can take these and we can apply them to things. So let's say you're designing the next pair of Air Jordans, or you're trying to come up with a new fabric for bed sheets, or you're doing something for apparel or clothing or wallpaper. Okay. We could use these tools to create, and we could take two or three different ideas that don't really belong together, and we can shove them in and mix them up and see what happens. And that's the fun and the creativity part of this. Okay. And so industrial designers and people who are making containers, they're making bicycles, they're making shoes, they're making these things, they're using this type of AI tool to iterate and create even faster before, because guess what they don't have to do. They don't have to sit and sketch the stuff. They could just put into some stuff, whatever, some ideas, and hit go, and instantly, like when I work, I create 48 to 60 images at once and they're all different. And then I can take the ones that I like and edit those and play with those, and the rest just get discarded. And this is how I can move to a really cool image faster. Now, the other idea here was I was commissioned to design a T shirt, that's my background is apparel design, to do a T shirt for an amusement park for their Halloween. Right.
- [19:43]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [19:43]
Marshall Atkinson
It was a super complicated project. Two or three years ago, this would have been 25 or 30 hours of work because they wanted a spooky town with a witch with a tarot card spinning and floating in the air. And they wanted all this kind of crazy magic stuff. Okay. If you're doing this by hand in Photoshop, each one of these elements has to be created individually so they look right on the shirt. I started with a thumbnail sketch like I always do, but I knew that I needed a crazy spooky sky. I knew I needed a town, I knew I needed a witch, a cauldron, torches, all this stuff. I created 29 separate elements in Mid Journey, brought them into Photoshop and kind of arranged them like a puzzle, right? And then in two and a half hours, my it was complete. So Instead of spending 30 hours on the design, I spent two and a half hours on the design. And frankly, I was paid a lot of money for that. So it's like one of these things where as a business person, I made more money per hour doing this and getting to the end result than if I had done it the old way without the tool. This is the reason why I think design professionals and other people who are actually doing this for a living, this is why we're using this tool.
- [21:04]
Michael Stelzner
I love this.
- [21:05]
Marshall Atkinson
And you can say, yeah, we're cheating. It's like, okay, well nobody cares how this thing was designed because we just want the T shirt. Like, I can do it by hand or I can use this tool. The end result is I got there faster. So guess what? I moved on to the next project. That's what matters with this stuff.
- [21:23]
Michael Stelzner
Well, and you had a very happy client, didn't you?
- [21:25]
Marshall Atkinson
Oh, yeah, they went crazy. And I should mention that the project that I had to do, it was due tomorrow.
- [21:32]
Michael Stelzner
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- [22:31]
Marshall Atkinson
It doesn't have a tool to knock the background out. But that is in so many different programs anyway, why worry?
- [22:38]
Michael Stelzner
Like Photoshop or whatever.
- [22:39]
Marshall Atkinson
So why worry about it? So you can design. Let's say we're doing a, I don't know, a logo of an eagle, okay. And we can use words like isolated, flat, white background.
- [22:52]
Michael Stelzner
There you go.
- [22:52]
Marshall Atkinson
Which will make your eagle. And then all you got to do is use your magic wand tool, click on the white, hit delete. Now it's you're done. Okay? I love it, so don't worry about it. And the other thing I'll tell you, a lot of people get hung up on because this AI image, it's not exactly perfect, okay? Like, for example, I did an illustration of a Jeep, like off roading, full of mud and that kind of stuff. And it said Jeff on it, Jep, not Jeep. Okay? So the whole image looked awesome. And then somebody was like a troll because I posted it said, oh, another Jeff, right? I'm like, okay, well, I'm posting what I did in about a half a second. I could make that say Jeep. You're slamming me on one thing.
- [23:36]
Michael Stelzner
You know, I get it totally.
- [23:37]
Marshall Atkinson
And now, frankly, I. I make sure it's edited, so I don't get that troll comment. But it's like one of these things where why worry about something that you can change in a matter of seconds? You did 99% of the work, okay? And it's ready to rock and roll. That's what's important here. And the other thing I want to say, Mike, is that right now, this second, this is the absolute worst version of Mid Journey that will ever exist.
- [24:05]
Michael Stelzner
How often do they update it, just out of curiosity?
- [24:07]
Marshall Atkinson
It's constantly being updated all the time. They're adding new tools. And I'm a power user, you know, I have the highest plan, so I got to take in a. They give you points on what they want to iterate next and create. Right. And I was voting on some stuff a couple months ago and you know, can we use hex codes for colors and all this different stuff? And I'm like, hell yeah. But I want it to be great because I know from a person who makes their livelihood from this, this is a fantastic tool. And as you can tell, I'm a.
- [24:42]
Michael Stelzner
Little excited about it, 100%. Okay, so there are some people that need to understand some things that are. There's plenty of people that are probably going to go try Mid Journey for the first time as they're listening to this interview. Let's talk about some of the very basic things they need to understand before they get into Mid Journey.
- [24:58]
Marshall Atkinson
Yep. So basic things, if you're starting with Mid Journey or any other AI tool, I would suggest that you first have your destination in mind of what you want. Right. Because it can do anything. What do you really want? So if you want to have Mid Journey drive the car, it'll do that. You can just hit the keyboard and type in gibberish like your cat walked across the keyboard. It'll give you an image, right? It always gives you an image. But if you want something hyper specific, what do you want? So you got to give it direction. Right? So think of yourself as like a movie producer, right? So you're a gaffer. What do gaffers do? They handle the lighting, right? So what's the lighting like? Is it low lighting? Is it cinematic lighting? Is it bright sunshine? Is it nighttime? You need to use words like that. Where is the camera? Like, if you're a movie director, is the camera low looking up? So it's kind of heroic looking, or is it like a drone shot looking down? Those words really matter if you want a different image or something that's really cool. Also, the art aesthetic, is it a photograph? Is it a painting? Is it a watercolor? Is it like a silver point engraving etching? You know, what do you want it to look like? And what's really fun about Mid Journey is that you can mash these ideas together. Right. You can have something that looks like it was forever ago, but is with new ideas. Right. And then I'll kind of give you a crazy twist that nobody's ever seen before. And I think what's fun about this is that it's allowing people who think creatively anyway to kind of do some things right. And. But there's tricks and tools and stuff. And my favorite was just released not too long ago, which is an SREF code. Right. So do we have time to talk about that real quick?
- [26:53]
Michael Stelzner
Yes, yes. But before we do, let's go back to a couple basics, just so everybody understands this. So far, what I've heard you say is it's really critical to understand what it is you want before you start this, because if you don't, it's just going to guess, right?
- [27:05]
Marshall Atkinson
Yep.
- [27:05]
Michael Stelzner
And the things we talked about are the lighting, what kind of lighting? And if you don't understand lighting well, then obviously don't worry about the lighting. I'm sure there's plenty of other things you could worry about. But the camera, where is it located? That's really important, Right? Wide shot, up close, art style. You said aesthetic. But like, is it watercolor? Is it photorealistic? What about like the use of color in general? Like, talk about that a little bit.
- [27:28]
Marshall Atkinson
You can put colors in there, right? So a good thing to do is to say, I want. Let's just use that eagle logo, right? I want an eagle logo. I don't want it red, white and blue. Right. If you don't say red, white and blue, it might show up as tan. And it could be a real looking eagle instead of a graphic looking eagle. So you got to put the words in that you want. And the trick is to find out what are really good prompt words. And since Mid Journey, like started, you can't believe how much I'm attuned to words. Now I'm always like, oh, that's a good prompt. And I write that down and I'll try it later. But what we want to do with color is we want to think about, let's just say blue. Well, what color? Blue, Light blue, Navy blue, Royal blue, Teal. Right. What do you want? If you're not specific, sometimes you don't get the right thing. But that's okay because in about a half a second you can re roll it and just use one word and replace it with the other. And then you kind of, you can sneak up on what you want to do. In fact, there's a whole Mid Journey workflow which is called additive prompting, which is just. You start with one word, eagle, and then you get a result, and then you add another prompt and another prompt, and you keep doing that until you get to where you want to go. That's kind of a fun experiment just to kind of play with that.
- [28:48]
Michael Stelzner
I want to ask you about the subject a little bit because I would imagine for anybody who's listening to this that's used to using like ChatGPT or Claude, you know, the more descriptive you are in these, the better the output. So any tips on how to describe the subject for people that maybe. How detailed can we get? I mean, is it we talk in paragraphs or just a couple of words like help people understand the basics of how prompting works?
- [29:13]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, sure. The basic kind of idea. And you can do your structure. The words can be any order that you want. But what I have found is the beginning word is the most important. The N word is less importance over about 60 words. Mid journey just doesn't pay attention to anything you put in. Right. And Mid Journey doesn't need correct capitalization. It doesn't even need spelling correctly because try to spell chrysanthemum, for example. I always get that wrong. I'm always googling that. I can't even really hardly say it, let alone spell it. So just putting this stuff in, I would say you don't need the, like the conjoiners and of the. Right, I see. So just put the different ideas in and that's all you need. Separate them by a comma. And that seems to work really well for Example, you can go to chat GPT and say, hey, write me a prompt. And then you can stick that in mid journey. And I, by the way, for those of you want to compare, I would take the Pepsi challenge and compare Dall E3 versus Mid Journey with the exact same prompt. Right? And my money's on mid journey. Every time.
- [30:27]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, what about modifiers? We talked about modifiers when we're prepping. What are those?
- [30:31]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, so modifiers are words, and that's not really a mid journey term. That's more a mind of what you want. Right. So let's say we want an angel. Okay, well, what's the angel doing? Is the angel floating in the air? Is the angel carrying a. A machine gun?
- [30:48]
Michael Stelzner
So it's the action that's happening.
- [30:50]
Marshall Atkinson
It's the action. What do you want them doing? You're. It's a chimpanzee. Okay? It's a chimpanzee doing what? Riding a bicycle? Taking naps? Surfing on a surfboard. The modifier is that. And then of those modifiers, what type of bicycle, what type of surfboard, how big is the wave? You want to describe these things because in your brain, you might have a kind of a loose picture. If you don't tell midjourney what you want, you're probably not going to get what's in your mind's eye. So we want to use better words. We want to be as specific as we can, and sometimes we don't really know the right word. So let's try some things out a little bit. And there's a great tip that I'll give you when you're using midjourney, if you want to try some things, is to use the curly bracket, which is the key, right next to the letter P. Curly bracket with a word and a comma and another word. You could do a couple of these, and you could do, for example, eagle, mouse, kangaroo, and then have a whole prompt string after that. If those three animals were in the curly bracket, what'll happen is you'll get a result with only the eagle. You'll get a result only with the mouse. You'll get a result only with the kangaroo. And that's how you can start playing around with these ideas. That could be the subject, that could be the color, that could be the art style, that could be the SREF code. It could be really anything that are in those curly brackets. And this is a great way to try out new ideas really super quickly because then you're really taking advantage of the speed of mid journey. Because a lot of these other platforms, it's like one image at a time or maybe four images, and that's what you get. I mean, I'm creating four or five dozen of these at once. Bam. All the time. Of course, I've got the plan for that because that really chews up your GPU time. But it's like one of these things where I want to get to the end result as fast as I can.
- [32:49]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so this bracket thing, which is hold down the shift key and it's above the P. Do you put these little variables? Comma, separated?
- [32:56]
Marshall Atkinson
Yes, comma separated. So eagle, comma, mouse, comma, kangaroo.
- [33:01]
Michael Stelzner
And it will randomly choose one of them, is what you're saying. Is that correct?
- [33:04]
Marshall Atkinson
It doesn't randomly choose. It does a result for anything that's in the bracket.
- [33:08]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, it's an order of operations.
- [33:09]
Marshall Atkinson
I. Yeah, it does whatever it is inside the curly bracket. And you could test ideas. It doesn't have to be the subject. It could be the color, could be the art style, could be lighting. It could be anything that you're testing this stuff out. And that's how other platforms. We're waiting on the thing to work, and then we get the result. Maybe we liked it, maybe we did. We're going to redo it here. I can do a whole bunch of stuff at once and I can discard the stuff I don't like and only play with the things that really work.
- [33:39]
Michael Stelzner
Now, when we're doing a general prompt, you said the beginning words are the most important. Can we string a bunch of words together or do we need commas? Do commas make a difference on midjourney prompting?
- [33:49]
Marshall Atkinson
In general, commas really don't make a difference. They make a difference to me because that's how I think. Right, I see. So I have a prompt architecture that's more or less in my head. Is subject, comma, what's it doing? Comma, lighting, comma, art, style, comma, things about mid journey, you know, how I want it to work, and I'm done. Now, that could be 20 or 30 words. It could be four. It just depends on whatever I'm playing with.
- [34:16]
Michael Stelzner
I love it.
- [34:16]
Marshall Atkinson
And I've got a lot of little tricks and things that I use, but it's basically that. And because that's how I write prompts all the time, I can work faster because I'm doing it the same way. It's just kind of a process.
- [34:29]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, srefs S R E F S For anybody listening, let's talk about what that is. And all that fun stuff.
- [34:36]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah. So sref, the original use of SREF is style reference, where you could use an image or something you created for Mid Journey or something that you uploaded. And it uses the style, which is the color and the texture or whatever, and that could influence your image. The new thing, and that's still super powerful. You should still use that. The new thing is called SREF code. They should just really rename it because it's confusing because it's the same word. Sref. SREF code. There's a string of numbers, and it goes up to billions, between 0 and 349 billion. I don't remember the huge number, but these codes, the same number works for everybody and I'll just use one because it's easy to remember. 507. Okay, so SREF code 507. So you'd be dash dash SREF 507 for anybody. Makes that image look like it was silver point engraved, black with gold. Whatever your image is, it makes it look like Paul Revere engraved it on some piece of metal 200 years ago or whatever. It has a very unique look to it. And it doesn't matter what your prompts are. If you put colors in or did anything, it's going to turn it into that.
- [35:58]
Michael Stelzner
It's like a bookmark, it sounds like. Because maybe the 507th image happened to be that. Is that generally how that.
- [36:04]
Marshall Atkinson
I don't know how these were invented. Who knows how the magic happens when they pull it out of the hat. It's just. Here it is. Right.
- [36:10]
Michael Stelzner
Let's say I created an image. Does each image from this point forward have its own SREF code?
- [36:14]
Marshall Atkinson
No. SREF codes are its own unique little thing.
- [36:18]
Michael Stelzner
I see.
- [36:18]
Marshall Atkinson
It's a way to modify the image. So if you do something and you put the SREF code in it, it's gonna make it look like that art aesthetic. Now, some of these are photographic, some of these are cartoons, some of these are sketchy doodle stuff. Some of these are Pixar looking, some of these are anime looking. They're all different and nobody really knows what they all are. That's the crazy thing. So if you look online on social media right now, everything is about SREF codes because it's kind of like finding money under the mattress. And it keeps giving us money and we don't know how much money's there. Let's keep playing with it. A great way to find SREF codes is one is just type in a period. Just a period, like you in Descendants period. And then dash, dash, sref, random. And then what you're gonna get back is this. Four crazy images. And who knows what they're gonna be.
- [37:19]
Michael Stelzner
Where do you type that in?
- [37:20]
Marshall Atkinson
Inside of midjourney, into the prompt window. There's a prompt window that you use for putting all your prompts in. So do period, dash, dash, sref, random and hit return. And you're gonna get back crazy stuff.
- [37:35]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, you need a space after the F and sref.
- [37:37]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, there's a space. Yeah, you're right. I'm assuming people know, but they don't.
- [37:42]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
- [37:42]
Marshall Atkinson
So it's. It's period space, dash, dash, sref space, the word random. Okay. Sref and random are all lowercase, Right? So type that in and do it. And what's going to happen is you're going to get back a result. That result is going to be an art style. And in the description of what that is, there's going to be a number. Okay. And that number is going to correspond with the art style has nothing to do with the subject matter of the image that Mid Journey just gave you. But let's just say it looks like, I don't know, a watercolor painting. Okay. So if you use that SREF code on something, let's say you're doing an image of a cheeseburger, it's now going to make that image of the cheeseburger look like a watercolor painting.
- [38:28]
Michael Stelzner
I see.
- [38:28]
Marshall Atkinson
Because it's the SREF code that's controlling the art. I have a massive spreadsheet now of SREF codes that I've discovered that I'm using. And I kind of rank them as for how much I like them from 0 to 10. And actually you gotta be above 6 just to make it to the spreadsheet. And so I have my favorites, and I'm always playing around with these. My favorite one looks like a really fine rapidograph pen drawing from like 1910 or something. I don't know. But it's like this really cool look to it. What I like about this is the fact that it nowhere shape and form looks like this stuff was created with AI.
- [39:10]
Michael Stelzner
I love it.
- [39:10]
Marshall Atkinson
It looks like somebody drew it or painted it or took a picture or whatever. That's what makes it really great. And I think that's one of the major strengths of Mid Journey is the fact it doesn't look like a bot or an algorithm created this thing. It looks real.
- [39:25]
Michael Stelzner
So talk to us about upscaling, just so people understand that upscaling by default.
- [39:31]
Marshall Atkinson
When you download anything you Create in Mid journey it's at 72 dpi at 1024 by 1024. So you can upscale like. But if you're like a professional and you need a higher resolution image, if you ever had anything printed, you know they always ask for a high res image, usually 300dpi. Right. We want a higher resolution to do something with it professionally so you can upscale the image. There's a button in Mid Journey that upscales it and what that does is it doubles the size. And so when you download it, when you take it into Photoshop or whatever, you can convert that to a 300dpi file easy and it has much better results. I personally also use a program called Gigapixel which is about 100 bucks and that uses AI to fill in. If you ever like zoomed in closely on stuff on a computer image, you'll see that it looks like sometimes it's missing images. Got little stair stepping little stuff. Gigapixel uses AI to interpolate what it thinks it's missing. And so you can take a low res image and make it really wonderful to use for print. I know all of my designer buddies, everybody uses Gigapixel because everybody is constantly giving them that 67k JPEG that looks like crap and they got to do something with it. They use a Gigapixel for that. So you can turn, you can shove your Mid Journey stuff in there if you need something really super huge because you're not just going to be printing a brochure, you're going to be making a billboard or something. That's what I would be using.
- [41:06]
Michael Stelzner
Got it. And you could use Gigapixel with any kind of upscaling that you need. It's reinterpreting it where the Mid Journey one is simply just doubling the resolution. It's not necessarily.
- [41:17]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, it's just doubling it. And I'll also tell you that a lot of people get hung up like Midjourney can design logos. Right. And, and the term that everybody wants is a vector logo. Right, right, right. So there's difference between raster and vector. I won't go into that. But everybody wants to get a vector thing. There are so many platforms out there where you can take something and vectorize it. Mid Journey does not offer vectorizing. I would just use an aftermarket platform like Vectorizer IE or something and those all work great. So I wouldn't even worry about that. The trick is to get the image that you like first. Let's not worry about what we're going to do after it. Let's worry about getting the right image first. I think that has to be the precedent in your workflow.
- [42:02]
Michael Stelzner
Talk to me about editing. I know this is a nightmare in Dall E3 and ChatGPT. What can you do editing wise inside of midjourney when you find something you really love?
- [42:10]
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, midjourney's got two ways to edit. So in the normal workflow where you can play around and do variations and different things, there's an edit button. So that can come up. And let's say you're doing a guy swinging a baseball bat and for some reason he's got seven fingers, right? You could just edit his hand and it'll only change. You just have an erase tool. You hit submit and then only where you erase will it redo that one part. Okay, so this is a way that you can delete some stray weird thing that's in there and then it'll give you four images to choose from. And then you can keep editing all you want and then keep improving. They also have another completely different separate area for editing where you can edit with bigger ideas. And this is where the real fun is. This is a new a feature they just released. And what I really like about this is a thing called retexture. So if you're looking at anything with mid journey, you probably heard about retexturing, but let me explain real quick. So retexturing is I could have a photograph, okay. And I could retexture it and now it's a drawing. Or I could take a drawing and I could retexture it and now it's a photograph. I could change backgrounds, I could do a whole bunch of stuff, but the main elements always stay the same. And that's what's really fun about this. If this was a visual show, I can show you all this stuff, but I want you to think about a project and just. I'll walk you through it really quickly. So I did an image of a safari jeep in one of my classes. So I teach classes at trade shows. And I did a jeep and it was a cartoon. Not cartoon, but like a comic book type illustration of a jeep. Right. And we brought that in with the Retexture tool. I changed the prompts to a photograph of the jeep. The jeep, angle, tires, everything are exactly the same. But now it's an image of a muddy jeep, just like you might see on an off road magazine. But it's exactly the same as that drawing. That's what you can do with the retexture thing. I Did a project the other day where I took a logo and I took that logo and I made it red, shiny plastic. I made it tie, dye, rainbow. I made it all these different textures and it's just hitting a button and doing it and letting Mid Journey do its magic. You just have to use the right prompts to tell midjourney what you want. Are the results perfect every time? No, you got to play around with a little bit. But it's just a really interesting way to go. And it's a really fun thing to do is to take an idea and then what else can we do with it? And one of the things I've always liked about Mid Journey is the idea of what's around the corner. What's the thing that we don't know yet. And I'm always trying to play with that, where I get an image and I kind of like the image. But it's the big question, what if, what if this was a drawing? What if this was an oil painting? What if this was a photograph? Let's see what happens. And now we've got better tools to be able to do that. So for creatives out there, how can you use this and what you naturally do and get an image that's so mind blowingly awesome that it attracts attention? Because that's what we want, if we're doing anything in content creation is we want to be seen and noticed. So can you create an image using these tools that's never been seen before? That blows people away. That's the power of this stuff because it's right there at the tip of your keyboard. All you got to do is write it, put the right prompts in and go. That's the promise.
- [46:07]
Michael Stelzner
I love it. Marshall, this has been absolutely amazing. If people want to discover more about your business or work with you, where do you want to send them?
- [46:13]
Marshall Atkinson
Well, first off, I would love for you to check out the Mid Journey Experience newsletter. So that's just midjourneyexperience.com if you're a creative professional. This is aimed at you. It publishes every single week. There's about four articles. I have some videos and tips in every issue. It gets delivered to your inbox for 12 bucks a month. And then I also have a YouTube channel with the same name, Mid Journey Experience, which is where you found me, right? And I've got a hundred and something videos up there about how to use Mid Journey better. And they're all made just for you. They're all really unedited. It's just me working And I'm talking while I'm working and you see the result, exactly how it comes out. I'm happy to share. And if you need personal help, you can reach out to me@marshallshell atkinson.com Happy to help you with any of this stuff. That's kind of what I do. We have a special offer for your listeners too. Do we want to talk about that?
- [47:11]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got a freebie? Let's hear it.
- [47:13]
Marshall Atkinson
I got a freebie. So if you go to midjourneyexperience.com SME right. I'm sure you guys all know what that means, right? I've got a Mid Journey survival guide that I made and it's basically just a. It's a flipbook with different ideas about how to use Mid Journey. It's absolutely free. You can go and download it and you can read about how to do things. So if you're playing around with Mid Journey, this is a really good primer for you to kind of get some key concepts and start learning. And you've seen it. What did you think about the guide, Mike?
- [47:49]
Michael Stelzner
I think it's amazing. Midjourney.com SME Marshall Atkinson, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.
- [47:57]
Marshall Atkinson
Thank you for the opportunity. It was a lot of fun.
- [47:59]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com a34 and be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcast app. And would you do me a favor and give me a review of this show on whatever platform you're listening on and also share this show with your friends. You can tag me. I'm Stelzner on Facebook, Stelzner on LinkedIn, and ikestellsner on X. And do check out our other shows, the Social Media Marketing Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.
- [48:42]
Marshall Atkinson
The AI Explored Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.
- [48:51]
Michael Stelzner
Don't forget to get your AI ticket to Social Media Marketing World 2025. Become an AI Enhanced Marketer. Grab your tickets now at social mediaexaminer.com Aicon.