How to use Negative Prompts in Midjourney (with Examples)

You can use negative prompts to specify what you don't want in your Midjourney generations.

Here's an example of where you could use a negative prompt:

When you use the word "painting" in your prompts you'll get photographs of paintings mounted on walls, sometimes with additions like a frame and furniture.

Let's say you just want the painting by itself. You would use negative prompting to get rid of all of the extra details:

Original

w/ Negative Prompts

Protip: Put all your negative prompts after a single --no, there's no need to write a --no for every individual thing

Examples of effective negative prompts

Use negative prompts to get rid of hands

It's not exactly a secret Midjourney can't do hands very well (yet). If you're getting too many weird hands, why not just hide them?

Original

w/ Negative Prompts

Use Negative Prompts to get rid of text

Text is another one of those things that Midjourney just doesn't do well. You can get rid of text with negative prompts.

The more elements you specify the better. I used "--no text font letters", which works much better than just "--no text":

Original

w/ Negative Prompts

You can see in this example, the negative prompt not only rid of the text, but it also made the images closer to the style I wanted (Milton Glaser, designer of the New York subway map) Midjourney was able to emulate the style better when it didn't have to focus on composing a logo with text.

You can observe a similar effect here:

Original

w/ Negative Prompts

When negative prompted to not include text, the end result is much closer to the artists' actual style.

This is a good way to transition into:

Use negative prompts to get the style you want

Here's a prompt I tried. While the original results are pretty, they're not what I wanted at all.

Original

w/ Negative Prompts

My hypothesis was that there were just too many 3D & photorealistic stormtroopers in the training data. It completely overpowered the rest of the prompt!

By specifying that I didn't want 3D in my negative prompt, I was able to get results much closer to what I was looking for.

Negative prompt while keeping the same Seed

Let's say you already have an image you like. You want to add a negative prompt to it. But you don't want to re-roll, because that would create different images.

You can re-create that exact image with a negative prompt, as long as you know the seed.

Every image has a seed, and images with the same seed are similar to one another. Here's how to find the seed of any image.

After you find the seed you can do very cool things like this:

Original

Same Seed w/ Negative Prompts

Alternate method: use negative image weights

Apart from using Negative Prompts, you can also use negative weights to specify what you don't want in your generations.

A little bit more on weights:

Weights are used to emphasize and de-emphasize different parts of a prompt.

Words with positive weights are emphasized while words with negative weights are de-emphasized.

The actual numbers don't matter: what matters is their proportion to each other. Words have a default weight of 1.

I prefer using weights over the "--no" command because they gives you fine-tuned control of every part of the prompt.

Here's how I would write the above example with weights:

anime by studio ghibli::1.4 stormtrooper::1.2 3d render realistic::-1.5

Follow up every part of the prompt with ::INSERT-WEIGHT-HERE.

Here are the results: