Last updated: 05/11/2026
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A good quick start hand-out for v8.1:
Midjourney Quick Start (v8.1) - Download!
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We’re live on prod! Try it now on midjourney.com. You will need to unlock your Global V7/V8 Personalization Profile to use it.
Below ⤵️ is a deeper dive based on community findings.
New to prompting in Midjourney? Start here: Midjourney Prompting Guide v8.1
🔵 V8.1 is balanced toward AESTHETICS at a small cost to ADHERENCE compared to the alpha release. These tips may increase adherence for some prompts:
--s below 100 to reduce resources spent on beauty and coherence so that they can be used to increase prompt adherence instead.--raw to swap out the resource-hungry default style for the “skinny” version.🔵 Moodboards and srefs may perform differently than in alpha. What to do?
--s below 100 to get the default style out of the way.--sd to match the prior seed type.🔵 We’re temporarily defaulting to --sd but be aware that HD mode is cheap enough to be the default (now 3x faster and 3x cheaper) and we may see a return to that. Until an v8.x version of --draft is available, you can use --sd the way you may have used --draft in v7, but it will be comparable to v7's full quality.
🔵 Want an upscale? Look for [Run as HD] button, which will rerun any SD job as HD. HD costs 1.33 minutes of GPU time, compared to SD which now costs less than 1 minute of GPU time.
🔵 Image prompting (good for rough composition scaffolding) is now implemented. To use: Include image(s) as URL(s) in the body of the prompt. Web-users can use the image prompts tile beneath the imagine bar. To weight the influence of that image, use --iw in 0.5 increments between 0.5 - 3.0.
🔵 There's a new Prompt Shortener, you can't escape it, but (update!) it will show you what it's doing so you can fix the prompt yourself. It may not be the most robust prompt for your image, so we advise checking it.
🔵Describe is improved compared to prior versions, but, honestly, it isn't as strong as it could be if you're looking for strong adherence, especially with the rebalance away from adherence. So. We still recommend our free Midjourney-trained custom GPT to maximize results:
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6781443b83888191813fbc93afa4dc64-clarinet-s-prompt-helper
Try this summary of v8.1 and start a new chat with this GPT to ask follow-up questions! 🤩
https://chatgpt.com/share/69dfdd5d-f64c-83ea-97e3-22e88b66fee9