How to Produce Similar Styles with Midjourney Style Reference — 4 Advanced Tips🎨

Replicate a Style and Maintain Consistent Aesthetics Easily!

Christie C.
Bootcamp
8 min readFeb 4, 2024

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If you have read my recent update on Midjourney V6, you will know that Midjourney has just released a new consistent style feature — a highly anticipated new capability called “Style References”.

This new feature allows you to specify one or more reference images that define the aesthetic you want Midjourney to maintain across your generated images

Today, I will show you how to leverage “Style References” to explore new visual dimensions.

A violin surrounded by flowers

Today’s content will be broken down into three sections starting with a brief description of the new feature and followed by

  • Part One: What is “Style References”
  • Part Two: How to use “Style References”
  • Part Three: 4 Advanced Tips to Further Stylization
Style Reference neon light word

Part One: What is “Style References”

“Style References” give you the ability to reference the style of another image or to keep a consistent style across many images.

Style References work similarly to image prompts where you give a URL to one or more images that ‘describe’ the consistent style you want to work over.

Highlight Features

  • Functionality: Work similar to image prompts where you give a URL to one or more images that ‘describe’ the consistent style you want to work over.
  • Use: Type --sref after your text prompt, followed by URLs to one or more style reference images like this: --sref urlA urlB urlC
  • Format: /imagine text prompt --sref stylePrompt1 stylePrompt2
  • Style Matching: The model looks at image URLs as ‘style references’ and tries to generate something that visually ‘matches’ their aesthetics.
  • Goal: Create output matching the provided aesthetics
  • Compatibility: Works for both V6 and Niji V6 ( Not work with V5 etc)
Violin and flowers surreal fantasy art

Part Two: How to use Style References

Step 1: Pick Your Reference Image

Use an image you generated with Midjourney or pick one online.

futuristic man

Step 2: Upload an Image or Copy a URL

Upload the images to Discord. You can upload more than one reference image. Upload it with the “+” side.

Upload A file on Discord

Step 3: Type Your Prompt

Type/imagineas you usually do. Then, input your prompt to describe the image you want to generate. Type

Type --sref after your text prompt, followed by URLs to one or more style reference images like this: --sref url

/imagine prompt: Text Prompt --sref url

Let’s look at this example below

Using Style reference with Midjourney on Discord
A futuristic tiger

With the New “Style Reference” feature, I can easily combine and replicate an image's style and aesthetic.

futuristic man
A futuristic tiger
Replicate a style with “Style References ”. Image reference (left) and new image (right)

📌 Parameters: You can add the parameters at the end of the prompt after--sref like aspect ratio. For example: /imagine cat --sref url --ar 2:3

Use More than One Reference

You can also use more than one reference image by including multiple URLs.

Type --sref after your text prompt, followed by URLs to one or more style reference images like this: --sref urlA urlB urlC

Here are the images generated with the reference images above. It perfectly combines the aesthetic above.

/imagine prompt: A { violin, bird, piano, hourglass } surrounded by flowers, --sref urlA urlB urlC

A violin surrounded by flowers

Part Three: 4 Advanced Tips to Further Stylization

You can make more customization with parameters and prompt weight. In this section, I will go over a few tricks that you can use to adjust the style of your resulting image:

  • Tip 1: Set Relative Weights with “::
  • Tip 2: Set the Stylization Strength with “--sw
  • Tip 3: Image Prompts
  • Tip 4: Prompt Consideration for Conflicting Styles

Tip 1: Setting Relative Weights

We can use ::to influence the prompt weights.

📌 What is Prompt Weights
When a double colon :: is used to separate a prompt into different parts, you can add a number immediately after the double colon to assign the relative importance to that part of the prompt.

For “Style references” we can use prompt weights by adding a number after the URL to determine the relative importance of the reference image.

You can assign relative weights to adjust the styles like--sref urlA::5 urlB::2

Modifying the prompt to “urlA::2 urlB::5” prioritizes “urlA”, resulting in an image with urlB as a secondary elements.

Let’s take these two images as a reference

Two images of surreal fantasy lion
“Style reference” prompt writing

Image One: urlA::2 urlB::5

Image with “Reference Image A” having weights of 2 and “Reference Image B” weighting 5

/imagine prompt: A lion wizard --sref urlA::2 urlB::5

A surreal fantasy lion wizard

Image One: urlA::5 urlB::2

Image with “Reference Image A” having weights of 5 and “Reference Image B” weighting 2

/imagine prompt: A lion wizard--sref urlA::5 urlB::2

A surreal fantasy lion wizard

Here, you can see how prompt weights affect the results.

Two images of a lion wizard. On the left is one with blue and cyan, on the right is red and cyan style.

Tip 2: Set the Stylization Strength with "--sw"

You can set the total strength of stylization via --sw 100(100 is default, 0 is off, 1000 is maximum)

Image Weight (--sw)

  • To increase the influence of the style, apply a style weight (--sw) that is closer to 1000.
  • To diminish the power of the style, set the weight closer to --sw 0 (default is 100).

Let’s take these two images as reference this time

Tow images of tiger. On the left is a futuristic neon light style, on the right is a surreal zodiac art style
Imagine text box of Midjourney on Discord

/imagine prompt: A tiger --sref urlA urlB --sw {25,1000}

Tip 3: Use Image Prompts to influence the Result

Besides the text prompt, you can use an image prompt together with a “Style Reference”

📌 What is Image Prompt
You can use images as part of a prompt to influence a Job’s composition, style, and colors. Images prompts can be used alone or with text prompts — experiment with combining images with different styles for the most exciting results.

To use an image prompt, it must go before --sref like this/imagine cat ninja ImagePrompt--sref stylePrompt

The image on the left is a girl with a butterfly covering her eyes. On the right is an image of a tiger

A girl with a butterfly covering her eyes

/imagine A girl with a butterfly covering her eyes ImagePrompt --sref URL

Here is the resulting image

A girl with a butterfly covering her eyes

Tip 4: Prompt Consideration for Conflicting Styles

If you want to introduce a conflicting style like illustration to your photorealistic prompt, you may still need to add some text to specify your preference.

Like this example below, I added the text “cartoon”

/imagine prompt: Cartoon style girl --sref url— v 6.0

Two images of a futuristic style girl. On the left is a photo, on the right is a cartoon style of that.

Things to Take Note of:

Impact of Style References:

  • There is no direct effect on image prompts
  • This applies only to jobs with at least one text prompt
  • It works for both V6 and Niji V6 ( Not work with V5 etc)

I hope you enjoy the guide today and the advanced tips. I love this new feature so much! This works so much better than--seed and time-saving.

Next- Make Money with “Style Reference”

Violin and flowers surreal fantasy art

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a brain full of creative ideas, surreal dreamy fantasy
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Christie C.
Bootcamp

🎨 AI Art Creator, Educator & Designer | 5 x Top Writer | Prompt, Tips & Turotial ❤️👉🏻 https://bit.ly/mastermidjourney