Many who use the popular image software Midjourney have had problems with Midjourney distortion. Human hands, arms, feet, and other body parts are often totally unrealistic. Extra fingers, matchstick arms, and feet disappearing into a blur are common.
Yes, there are explanations for why this happens. Regardless, this flaw makes folks waste significant time getting Midjourney to generate images of people that don’t include these artifacts.
After spending many frustrating hours, either trying to dream up prompts that avoid these problems or cropping out distorted portions of images, I’ve finally developed an approach that minimizes Midjourney distortion of body parts.
Because I use Midjourney to generate images to illustrate my weekly blog posts, I want optimally sized illustrations for the social media where I repost. For me, that’s an aspect ratio of 16:9, aka landscape. So, I include –-ar 16:9 in my Midjourney prompts.
And I see a lot of misshapen body parts.
Here, for example, are four images Midjourney created on August 30, 2023, with the prompt:
/imagine two men shaking hands –ar 16:9
All four of these images include distorted hands. Three of them display six fingers on one hand! (The top right image is close to OK, but fails a close examination.)
I write mainly about meeting design. Meetings involve people, so I usually want people to appear in my illustrations. For several months, Midjourney’s body part idiosyncrasies frustrated me and I had to waste time experimenting with prompts to create acceptable images.
An AHA! moment
I’m sure that most Midjourney users spend some time scrolling through other folks’ images. Doing this one day, I noticed that some images seemed to be free of body part distortions. Were these people just lucky? Suddenly I realized that the images that were mostly free of artifacts used Midjourney’s default aspect ratio (1:1, aka square)!
A quick test showed that, for some reason, Midjourney does a much better job of avoiding distortions when generating square images.
For example, 30 seconds after I generated the above “two men shaking hands” landscape images, I ran the prompt:
/imagine two men shaking hands
Here are the four square images Midjourney produced:
Much better! All four images show little or no hand artifacts.
OK! So now I know how to create almost-distortion-free human body images. But I want to generate images with landscape aspect ratios, not square ones. What to do?
Generating great landscape images from square images in Midjourney
So, here’s the final trick. Suppose I want a landscape version of the top-right square image above. Here are the steps to take:
- Upscale this image (by clicking the U2 button below the set of four images). Here’s what you’ll get after the upscaling.
- Next, click the “Zoom Out 2x” button. You’ll get four versions of the same central image extended outwards!
- Pick the version you like (or regenerate the Zoom until you see a satisfactory image) and upscale it. I’ll pick number 3 (click the U3 button).
- Finally, use your favorite image editor to create a landscape crop that contains the core image. (I use Keynote.)
Success! We’ve got the image and aspect ratio we wanted with no distortion of body parts.
To recap
I minimize Midjourney body part distortion by initially generating square images that have few or no artifacts. I then extend satisfactory images with Midjourney’s excellent Zoom tool which maintains the central image. Finally, I crop the extended image to the aspect ratio I want.
Perhaps Midjourney will fix this irritating behavior in the future. Until then, I hope you find this tip helpful. Feel free to share your experience with it in the comments below.
P.S. I’ve noticed this distortion problem in other image generators. Perhaps this tip can be relevant for them too!