Midjourney is capable of greater detail than ever before
Midjourney has solved one of the biggest problems with generative AI art with the option to upscale images to super-high resolutions.
Until this week, Midjourney’s output was limited to a default resolution of 1,024 x 1,024 pixels. That was large enough for medium-sized web images, but not high resolution enough to print at anything greater than postcard size.
Now the company has added the option to upscale images by 2x or 4x, meaning the maximum image size is increased to 4,096 x 4,096 in the default square format. In other words, that’s a 4K resolution image.
The upscaler can be applied to images with different aspect ratios, too. On a 16:9 image, for example, the 4x upscaling delivers a resolution of 5,824 x 3,264.
This massive jump in resolution means Midjourney’s AI-generated images could be printed at A3 size and not look blurry or pixelated. The resolution is also more than good enough for creating high-quality web images or desktop wallpapers, for example.
The Cost Of Upscaling
Upscaling images to these new resolutions does come at a cost. Whilst upscaling to the default image size normally only takes a few seconds, 4x upscaling jobs can take two or three minutes to complete.
Midjourney charges customers for the amount of processing time they consume, so upscaling images will eat into the number of images customers can generate within their monthly allowance. Customers can pay extra to increase the number of hours they’re permitted, however.
The company also warns that the upscalers may be temperamental, advising that in “very rare” instances upscaling may result in “black or corrupted image on 4x upscales”. The company also adds that “blurry” images won’t be improved by upscaling and that images might get slightly darker when upscaled.
High-Res Competition
Midjourney’s new upscalers have been released just a week after Adobe raised the resolution bar for AI-generated images with the launch of Firefly 2.
Adobe bumped the resolution of its Firefly images to 2,048 x 2,048—the same resolution as Midjourney’s 2x upscaled images, but only half the resolution of the 4x upscaler.
It’s indicative of a growing arms race in the generative AI art industry, with companies attempting to outdo one another on image quality and resolution. Open AI recently announced DALLE 3, which—in addition to claimed improvements in its ability to deliver images described in text prompts—also bumped the default resolution to 1,729 x 1,024.
