Midjourney 5.2 delivers infinite zoom alongside powerful tools to add extra style and variety

The newly updated Midjourney 5.2 is letting users zoom out of images for the first time – along with a host of other new features.

The generative AI art service has rapidly evolved over the past year and this latest release keeps the foot on the accelerator, with a range of powerful capabilities.

Midjourney 5.2 infinite zoom

The most striking new feature is the ability to zoom out of images. When users upscale an image, they are presented with the options to zoom out by 1.5x or 2x. They can choose a custom zoom ratio if they want to pull out even further.

This means you can start with a close-up image showing fine detail and keep zooming out, theoretically to infinity. Or, more realistically, when your Midjourney credits run out. Here, we started with a close-up image of a woman’s eye and zoomed out by 2x three further times until we could see her entire face, all of which is completely AI generated.

Greater variety of images

Midjourney 5.2 is also boosting the amount of variety on offer when users decide they want a different version of a generated image.

In Midjourney 5.1 and recent predecessors, clicking the ‘vary’ button under upscaled images produced a series of almost identical images, with very minor changes. Now there are two buttons – ‘vary (strong)’ and ‘vary (subtle)’ – the former of which produces images with much greater variation.

For example, here’s an image we generated of a Formula One car:

Here are the options we were provided with when we requested subtle variations:

And here’s what was offered when we hit the strong variation button:

Midjourney has also tweaked the stylize options that allow users to define how strongly an artistic effect should be applied. The prompt for the image below was:

Rowing boat on a lake at sunrise, in the style of Tang Yau Hoong --ar 16:9

When we turned the stylize parameter up to the maximum by adding –stylize 1000 to the prompt, Midjourney 5.2 generated the following image. As you can see, it is vastly different to the more minimalist image above:

Users can now choose any stylize value between 0 and 1000. The default value is 100.

Prompt shortening in Midjourney 5.2

Finally, Midjourney 5.2 includes a new command that can help users create shorter prompts. One of the great myths of AI image generation is that the text prompts need to be stuffed with specific detail to get the best results. Midjourney is trying to dispel this myth with the /shorten command.

We found a particularly long prompt created by another Midjourney user, which is typical of the kind of over-embellished prompts found on the service:

In this captivating pencil character sketch by Rolf Armstrong, the viewer is transported to a bygone era of elegance and allure. The sketch showcases a strikingly beautiful woman with graceful features and a mysterious smile. Her eyes hold a hint of intrigue, inviting the viewer to delve into her story. The sketch captures the essence of the subject's personality through delicate shading and precise lines, creating depth and dimension. Armstrong's skilled technique brings the character to life, capturing every nuance of expression. The monochromatic tones add a timeless quality to the sketch, allowing the viewer to appreciate the artistry and the subject's captivating presence

That prompt generated the following image:

We then used the /shorten command on the prompt, which reduced it to this:

captivating pencil character sketch by Rolf Armstrong, the viewer is transported to a bygone era of elegance and allure. The sketch showcases a strikingly beautiful woman with graceful features and a mysterious smile. Her eyes, hint of intrigue, sketch 

And that generated the following image, which is very similar:

Midjourney says the aim of the /shorten command is to give users “suggestions on what words might not be doing anything and which ones might be key”.

Read our guide on how to get the best art from Midjourney 5 here.