Midjourney is able to get more details than ever before
Midjourney solved one of the biggest problems in generative AI art with the ability to upscale images to very high resolutions.
Until this week, Midjourney’s output was limited to a default resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels. It was large enough for medium-sized web images, but not high-resolution enough to print at anything larger than a postcard size.
The company has now added the ability to enlarge images by 2x or 4x, meaning the maximum image size is increased to 4096 x 4096 in the default square format. In other words, it is a 4K resolution image.
The upscaler can also be applied to images with different aspect ratios. On a 16:9 image for example, 4x scaling provides a resolution of 5824 x 3264.
This massive jump in resolution means that Midjourney’s AI-generated images could be printed at A3 size and not appear blurry or pixelated. The resolution is also more than enough to create high-quality web images or wallpapers, for example.
The cost of scaling
Upscaling images to these new resolutions comes at a cost. While scaling to the default image size normally takes only a few seconds, 4x scaling tasks can take two or three minutes.
Midjourney charges customers for the processing time they consume, so image scaling will reduce the number of images customers can generate within their monthly allocation. Customers can, however, pay extra to increase the number of hours they are allowed.
The company also warns that upscalers can be finicky, saying that in “very rare” cases, upscaling can result in “a black or corrupted image on 4x upscales.” The company also adds that “blurry” images will not be improved by upscaling and that images may become slightly darker when upscaling.
High resolution competition
Midjourney’s new upscalers launched just a week after Adobe raised the resolution bar for AI-generated images with the launch of Firefly 2.
Adobe increased the resolution of its Firefly images to 2048 x 2048, the same resolution as Midjourney’s 2x upscaler images, but only half the resolution of the 4x upscaler.
This speaks to a growing arms race in the generative AI art industry, with companies trying to outdo each other in image quality and resolution. Open AI recently announced SLAB 3, which, in addition to claimed improvements in its ability to deliver images described in text prompts, also increased the default resolution to 1729 x 1024.