Weddings are very personal occasions, and engaged couples often spend a fortune to make their fairy tale come to life. Sometimes, a significant cost can come in the form of the first letters that give the couple their seal of approval: save-the-dates and wedding invitations.
Sure, couples can find some basic e-invitations or printable templates with watercolor flowers or a general theme to announce their wedding, but what if one partner is a huge nerd? (It’s me. I’m a nerd.)
If they were to have a StarCraft-themed wedding, or an engagement party featuring cyberpunk details, and a party themed to the aesthetic of Baldur’s Gate 3 Joint Bucks event, what to do? Customized invitations can get expensive quickly, so here’s how to use Midjourney, an artificial intelligence text-to-image tool, to make your wedding event invitations not only stand out, but perfectly represent who you are.
(Chinese) The journey begins
Working with something as important as wedding invitations requires a specialized tool to produce images of high enough quality so that they can be used as digital or printed materials. I’m using Midjourney, which is used to create visuals for everything from graphic novels to images of less noble virtue.
Midjourney uses text prompts to generate images based on its training material, like most AI tools for rapid art creation. It launches in beta in 2022 and runs on Discord via a web browser, with an attractive price tag of free limited queries and $10 to $120 per month for more tips and faster results.
Since beta, Midjourney has added some of the most powerful and customizable options among text-to-image AI tools, including blending two images to generate a new image and setting parameters around unique features, as Midjourney developers say Confusion or clear differences in images produced from a single cue.
I bet the flexibility and specificity offered through Midjourney will yield results that will make your nerdy wedding event invitations shine brighter than the Crystalline bricks and mortar.
No small talk, only results
Unlike chatbots ChatGPT and Copilot, Midjourney has no personality. It’s not built for back-and-forth collaboration or the ability to elaborate on images by referencing previously generated artwork in conversation notes, but what it lacks in casual chat it more than makes up for in versatility.
Here’s how to get the best results with Midjourney’s text-to-image tips.
1. Be specific about the end use of the image. Let Midway know that these images will be used as printable invitations to avoid the following (invitations that would make any vampire bride blush with delight, but don’t serve as actual anchor material).
Adding the words “printable invitation” to the prompt would have produced more realistic results, but they were a bit busy, which brings us to our next bit of advice:
2. Break down what you want and what you don’t want. Midjourney lets you instruct the tool to exclude certain elements from the image via a specific “No” command at the end of the prompt. For example, the invitations should be inspired by fantasy, but I don’t want them to contain mythical creatures, and the result it returns is lots of scales and claws. For God’s sake, this fictional wedding was an elegant event, not a Renfield tailgate.
3. Refine the picture style and add some feeling to the prompts. The result was less romantic and more “Fus Ro Dah” so I added “whimsical” and “delicate” to the prompt and here’s the result. It’s still not a Baldur’s Gate theme, but Midway allows for so-called “change zone” editing, where you can select specific elements to change.
I enhanced the scene with some Baldur’s Gate Easter eggs using the “Change Region” command. This part took a lot longer than I expected – and by longer I mean about 15 minutes of regenerating the results – but the end result was worth it.
Midjourney also adds English text to images through its text generation command, making it easy to create higher-resolution (2,048 x 2,048 pixels) images.
Now all that’s left to do is pop it into a Word file, Google Docs, or a tool like Canva, add text, and send it out into the world for your loved ones to RSVP closer to the event date.
If you can record what the new elements refer to, you might receive an invitation to a reception. Sorry, no brats allowed.
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