No more third party face-swaps needed, the long awaited and most often requested Midjourney feature has finally launched a few days back and it’s a real game changer. Character consistency, in other words an ability to recreate characters consistently across new images, is something we all have been missing since day one, yet nobody ever doubted it was coming. The absence of this aspect and the dominance of generative AI random nature has posed considerable challenges in crafting visual narratives, storyboarding, novels or even in the creation of cohesive series, often making it a real hurdle. Thankfully, that is no longer the case! There we are.

This feature enables creators to effortlessly apply identical facial features, body type, clothing and other attributes across numerous image iterations via a straightforward ‘cref’ (short for “character reference”) tag. Are we on the verge of witnessing Midjourney’s transition from being cool to becoming a professional-grade tool? So it seems, as it is getting new updates almost every week since the v6 launch in December.

By now, the consistent character tool demonstrates optimal performance when utilized with an image initially generated within MidJourney, not ready to handle your own pics yet unfortunately. However, by harnessing one’s creativity and leveraging the diverse array of options provided by MJ, one can truly work wonders. Let’s take a look.

The parameters to work with are as follows:

The results i.e.:

artist: Halim Alrasihi / prompt: Character sheet –cref (Image URL of your character) –s 250 –ar 4:5 –v 6.0 / source: X

CHARACTER INPAINTING & CHARACTER CONSISTENCY

“You can use Midjourney’s inpainting tool (vary region) and change a person to your own consistent character. No more face swaps needed. The beest part is, it also changed her characteristic pink wavy hair. A face swapper won’t do that.”

Halim has put together a great tutorial on combing the two, namely the cref and vary region to get the most out of multi character consistency and character blending. You can check it out here.

Would be posing be of any interest? If so, then check out this tip by Tatiana Tsiguleva.

“CHARACTER REFERENCE & POSES IN MIDJOURNEY

– Catalog Pose
– High-Fashion Pose
– Dramatic Pose
– Headshot
– Profile Pose
– Action Pose

Tips:
1. Use –cw 0 to improve your prompt results.
2. Add “full body shot” to your prompt, but review the results carefully. Often, you’ll find the body proportions are incorrect, such as a head that’s larger than it should be.”

artist: Tatiana Tsiguleva / source: X

Everybody knows camera angles are the magic ingredient, here is one great tutorial by Marco precisely on camera angles and cref.

“CAMERA ANGLES & CHARACTER CONSISTENCY

Been running a few prompts using Midjourney’s new Character Consistency + camera angles. These turned out pretty cool! I

I have included the original image I used as –cref”

artist: Marco / source: X

If you’d be interested in making the most of cref but in a product shot, let us serve you with a great tutorial by Salma.

PRODUCT SHOTS & CHARACTER CONSISTENCY

“Midjourney character consistency greatly enhances staging product mockups in a meaningful way with backgrounds! I combined a raw image of this product with a background image, and the results are quite compelling!”

1) Use the “/describe” feature 2) Upload your raw product image 3) Upload your desired background image 4) Copy the image description prompt from your product 5) Repeat the process for your background image 6) Add –cref at the end 7) Use the following prompt formula (image description prompt product) + (image description prompt background image) + (image link product) + (image link of background) (–cref)

artist: Salma / source: X

Here’s how to do it in details.

and finally, last but not least

SWAP FACES IN MIDJOURNEY

“To achieve this, we will make use of 2 of Midjourney’s key features:
– Character References (–cref)
– Regional Variation (Vary Region)”

artist: Hugo Ventura / source: X

See the super useful tutorial by Hugo Ventura here.