Weddings are very personal events, and couples often spend a lot of money to make their dream day a reality. A big part of the expense can come from the first things they send out: save-the-date cards and wedding invitations.
Sure, couples could find some basic e-vites or printable templates with watercolor flowers or a generic theme to announce their nuptials, but what if one of the partners is, for example, a huge nerd? (It’s me. I’m the nerd.)
If you’re planning a Star Trek-themed wedding, a cyberpunk engagement party, or a joint bachelor/bachelorette event inspired by Baldur’s Gate 3, custom invites can quickly become expensive. Here’s how you can use the AI tool Midjourney to create unique and personalized wedding invites that truly reflect your style without breaking the bank.
The (Mid)journey begins
Creating wedding invitations is important, so I’m using a specialized tool to make high-quality images that can be used digitally or printed. I’m using Midjourney AI, which is also used to create visuals for things like graphic novels and other types of images.
Midjourney uses text prompts to generate images based on its training data like most AI tools made to fast-track art creation. It was launched in beta in 2022 and runs through Discord via web browser with the attractive price tag of free for limited queries, and a range of $10 to $120 per month for more prompts and faster results.
Since its beta release, Midjourney has become one of the most advanced and customizable text-to-image AI tools. It includes features like blending two images to create a new one and setting parameters for unique functions, such as “chaos,” which introduces noticeable differences in images generated from the same prompt.
I bet Midjourney’s flexibility and detail will make your nerd wedding invites shine brighter than the Crystalline Entity.
No chit-chat, just results
Midjourney AI isn’t designed to have conversations like chatbots such as ChatGPT or Copilot. It can’t discuss or build on previous images in a chat. However, it makes up for this with its wide range of capabilities in creating images.
Here’s how to get the best results out of Midjourney’s text-to-image prompt.
1. Be specific about the end use of the images. Let Midjourney know these images will be used as printable invites to avoid results like the below (invites that would make any vampire bride blush with delight but don’t work as actual stationary).
Adding the phrase “printable invite” to the prompt yields more practical results, but they were a little busy, which brings us to the next bit of advice:
2. Break down what you do and don’t want. Midjourney allows you to direct the tool to exclude certain elements in the images through a specific “no” command on the end of the prompt. For example, the invites should be fantasy inspired, but I don’t want them to contain mythical creatures, and the results it was returning were heavy on scales and claws. This fictional wedding is a classy event, for Gods’ sake, not a Renfaire tailgate.
3. Refine the style of the imagery and add some feeling to the prompt. The results were coming off less romantic and more “Fus Ro Dah,” so I added “whimsical” and “delicate” to the prompt, resulting in the below. It’s still not reading as a Baldur’s Gate theme, but Midjourney allows for something called “vary region” editing where you can select specific elements to change.
I enhanced the scene with some Baldur’s Gate easter eggs using the “vary region” command. This part took much longer than I’d anticipated — and by much longer I mean about 15 minutes of regenerating results — but the end result was worth it.
Midjourney also adds English text to images with its text generation command, and provides for easily creating higher-resolution (2,048 x 2,048 pixels) images.
Now, you just need to put this into a Word document, Google Doc, or a tool like Canva to add text. Then, send it out so your loved ones can RSVP, probably much later than you’d like.
If you can figure out what the added elements are referring to, you might get invited to the party. Sorry, no troublemakers allowed.
Source: CNET