Midjourney is pretty good at creating realistic human characters that do not exist at all and are 100% artificially create AI based images. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could take your own profile pic and feed it to AI to create different versions of yourself using the /imagine command in Midjourney. Well actually that is quite easy and you can force the character or face to be same by using image prompt as part of your text based prompt.

All you need to do is upload your profile pic somewhere on the internet or on the discord server (as you are using), get the public link of the image and use it with your prompt. To illustrate how you can create different profile pics of your face I am going to use couple of images from Unsplash.

Source Images

I am using the following two images and if you want you can copy the link of these images and experiment by yourself. Make sure the photo you use it a front shot of yours and without any sunglasses. This way Midjourney will have all the information about your face to create various versions of you.

Create your Profile Pic

Now that we have a source ie. our profile image that we want to you let’s get started with creating various AI Profile pics from here on. So the prompt will be <image url> photo of a man/woman, attributes, styles you can then keep feeding desired variations prompts to Midjourney to create multiple stylised AI images of yourself.

Let’s start with the female image sample from above. My prompt is <image url> cyberpunk gothic photo of a young woman, caucasian –ar 16:9

–ar 16:9 defined the widescreen aspect ratio that I want in the image.

Those experiencing issues generating these image try to use the –v 4 or –v 5 model in the prompt. This prompt and blog post was tested with these Midjourney models which at the moment you can still evoke using these arguments.

<image url> cyberpunk gothic photo of a young woman, caucasian –ar 16:9

You can see that the images created represent the face of the same real person that we fed to Midjourney using the image prompt. There is an added bonus of “young woman” as she looks lot younger in her AI generated images. If you want to get a few more style options checkout our Punk Styles in Midjourney post focused on these various styles.

Here are a few more versions of her and the prompt in the caption.

<image url> photo of atompunk young woman, caucasian –ar 16:9
<image url> photo of Deathpunk young woman, low angle, caucasian –ar 16:9
<image url> photo of Devilpunk Electropunk young woman, low-angle closeup, caucasian –ar 16:9

now let’s try a few things with the young man’s photo which we selected above as the main image prompt. Let’s create a glamorous cinematic looking shot of this image by using <image url> glamour photo of a young man, lv jacket, wide shot, studio lighting, soho, shot on Fujifilm Eterna 400, 4k –ar 16:9

<image url> glamour photo of a young man, lv jacket, wide shot, studio lighting, soho, shot on Fujifilm Eterna 400, 4k –ar 16:9

Wow right? here is another version but changing the Fujifilm film style. I shoot with Fujifilm cameras in real world so I now these profiles best but you can try others that you are familiar with from Canon or Nikon etc.

<image url> glamour photo of a young man, lv jacket, wide shot, studio lighting, soho, shot on Fujifilm Classic Negative 400, 4k –ar 16:9

In case you are skeptical here is the screenshot from my Midjourney prompt. There is no other hidden secret here!

Checkout the below variations that I tried in square aspect ratio. You can try various different style prompts or simply if an artist you like just add “by <artist name>”. There are 1000s of artists that are recognised by Midjourney and you can check out the complete study of this in the post Artist Styles on Midjourney

<image url> by Chiho Aoshima
<image url> photo of a deathpunk young man
<image url> lofi by kawese hasui
<image url> photo of a cyberpunk electropunk young man
<image url> by charles burns
<image url> by giger

Feeling Brave – Age Yourself?

If you are feeling brave and want to continue having fun try to add “old” in the prompt, so for example old man or old woman. Here is what you can expect from Midjourney.

<image url> photo of atompunk old woman, caucasian –ar 16:9
<image url> old man by Chip Zdarsky

Hopefully this post helps you create AI based profile pics of yourself using Midjourney. It is heaps of fun actually I am looking forward to what you create and if you are on Instagram or Twitter be sure to tag me @harmeetgabha

Update: 14 March 2023 – Saw another cool prompt so had to try it with my above source image.

<img url> futuristic male in an advanced suit, clean shaved, blue eyes, lab background, sharp focus, comic book

Update 19 March 2023

A few people have expressed concern that they were unable to achieve the results with the above method. I have experimented in Midjourney v5 as well as originally with v4 and I can continue to see the same face in the results. Here is another source image firstly created in Midjourney v5

Source image created in Midjourney v5

You want to use a front facing original source image that is the basis of your creations. After that its just a matter of adding what you want Midjourney to do with this image. Here are a few prompts I used:

  • <img url> photo of young man, cartoon character –v 5
  • <img url> a man as a fictional character by Simon Stålenhag, trending on artstation –v 5
  • <img url> a young man as a fictional character by Aaron Jasinski, trending on artstation –v 5
  • <img url> a middleaged man –v 5
  • <img url> a young man by Alex Gross –v 5

You can see the examples below that you can same persons face but based on prompt you can vary the age of the character as well.

<img url> photo of young man, cartoon character –v 5
<img url> a man as a fictional character by Simon Stålenhag, trending on artstation –v 5
<img url> a man as a fictional character by Simon Stålenhag, trending on artstation –v 5
<img url> a young man as a fictional character by Aaron Jasinski, trending on artstation –v 5
<img url> a young man by Alex Gross –v 5
<img url> a middleaged man –v 5

Readers Image

One of the readers of the blog reached out at they were having issues with using their image and not getting the same result as demonstrated above. I think lots of times it depends how well the portrait is that you are using as the sample. Also make sure you are using similar aspect ratio to the output that you want to get.

In this case Midjourney did struggle to produce the same face using this image. However you can force more of the image by using something called Image Weight defined as –iw <value>. Value of 1 is normal weight amongst the image and prompt. However to ensure more of the image is used you can use a value of 1.5 or 2. I would not suggest going higher because then more of the original image will be represented in the generated output.

Self Image of the reader – i cropped to square ratio 1:1
<img url> photo of man, cartoon character –v 5
(resulting images are not very much like the image on the left)

Once I force the original image weight in the prompt you get better results as seen below.

<img url> photo of man, cartoon character –v 5 –iw 1.5
<img url> a young man by Alex Gross

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