MIDJOURNEY PROMPT EXPERT
Focus
As a professional photographer with nine years of experience, I am pleased to impart knowledge pertaining to commonly encountered photographic terminology. In various prompts, it has come to my attention that there is a prevalence of conflicting or nonsensical terms, such as the juxtaposition of “soft shadows” and “hard shadows” within the same context. The fifth segment of this instructional series will primarily concentrate on the concept of focus. The terminology employed throughout the discussion will be comprehensible to individuals with limited or no background in photography.
I will say this. As of now, the effect of asking for a specific type of focusing to Midjourney seems pretty hit or miss at this point, but I have got better success with this than other photo terms. Meaning it does something if you’re asking for it, just not necessarily what you are expecting all the time… this is more true if you are like me a photographer. “Then why are you telling us all that?” you’re asking. Because I truly think, just like the hands situation, that we will see in the near future a version of Midjourney that will absolutely understand the focus as it should.
First off, the focus is the part of the image where it should be at it’s sharpest (not blurry). In modern cameras, in manual mode we are able to choose where the focus is, and in automatic mode, the camera decides for us. For a professional doing portrait (person), the most common part we tend to focus when we are shooting a person are the eyes.
Hard focus, “no defocus” (this is a prompt term that works or worked at least in V4) :
This means theoretically that your image should be in focus for the most part (I am still unsure even after I produced thousands of images if MJ understands this has having a a very large Depth of field (please read the part of my tutorials about DOF) so the result
Soft focus:
A soft focus is in fact the equivalent of asking for a not perfectly focused image (it’s still in focus, but it’s not perfect)…that’s great in many ways, for instance achieving a hazy looking feel, a vintage or film result, etc. I love to use this…it tends to give a more film like or natural look to images IMO.
Free lensing:
The action of free lensing is a when a photographer physically detaches his lens from the body of the camera to manually create very dreamy look and I must tell you, it’s rewarding when you are able to do this, but it’s super hard to do. I’ve tried it but it’s still unclear at the moment that MJ understands it correctly.
Tilt shift:
A tilt shift in photo is achieved by using a very special lens that deviates the focus (I attempted to simplify). The effect is causing the scene to look miniaturized. It can be created using Photoshop as well…this is really cool when done properly!
The depth of field (DOF) also affects the focus area of an image a lot, but I will invite you to read my tutorial about the DOF on my page (L’imaginarium de Denis Girard) or here somewhere