Midjourney is a powerful tool for creating stunning landscape illustrations, but when it comes to adding people to the composition, it can be a source of great frustration. It seems as if the default framing for Midjourney is to produce a close-up portrait, most frequently of a white girl in her 20s. Whether you’re struggling with getting the right proportions or finding it challenging to make the people look natural within the scene, these challenges can be a barrier to achieving the desired result. With a few simple techniques, it is possible to overcome these obstacles and create landscape images with people that are well-composed, visually appealing, and suitable for usage with copy text (such as when creating a children’s book or other graphic design purpose).
Using these 2 concepts will help you get the results you’re after.
1) Use photograph composition phrasing such as “small people at medium distance” or “Wide angle“.
2) Use multi prompts, ie, “weighting” to separate the concepts of your image. I use weighting on the “wide angle, distance” structure to achieve better results.
Here are some prompt and upscaled image result examples:
“Wide angle. small people at large distance shot::2 two young girls with red jackets, blue skirts, and orange backpacks::1 enjoying the view from the top of a mountain, hand drawn digital landscape illustration in the style of Atey Ghailan and Mary Blair::2 –seed 942676187 –ar 16:9″
With that prompt, I get my desired result, which is an emphasis on the type of composition I want, with more landscape in the picture and less of the picture taken up by the people.
Here’s some other examples to show you alternatives that place more focus on the people in the composition.
If I didn’t weigh the “distance” at a::2, but gave it similar weighting as the people, then I get a closer-up shot.
“2 young girls with red jackets, blue skirts, and orange backpacks::1 Wide angle. small people at large distance shot::1 enjoying the view from the top of a mountain, hand drawn digital landscape illustration in the style of Atey Ghailan and Mary Blair::2 –seed 942676187 –ar 16:9″
To create a shot that has a greater emphasis on the people, I’d create a prompt with equal weighting to all the ideas within the prompt, such as:
two young girls wearing red jackets, blue skirts, and orange backpacks::1 Wide angle. small people at large distance shot::1 enjoying the view from the top of a mountain, hand drawn digital landscape illustration in the style of Atey Ghailan and Mary Blair::1 –seed 942676187 –ar 16:9
A side effect of de-emphasizing the character though is that there is definitely a drift of what they look like. In this last image, the girls are the closest to what I wanted in terms of character design, but they’re taking up far more of the image than I’d like.
I hope that’s instructive.
Using the SEED parameter is critical when experimenting as you can see that the basic ideas of each rendered image are the same, but the zoom factor has changed.
If you’re looking for a general guide to the type of photographic perspectives, David Comfort has put together a pretty comprehensive guide over on Midjourney. He goes over some of the other language you can use, such as high-angle or low-angle. He goes in to depth about the usage of f-stops to adjust the focus, which I think is a far under-utilized trick.