You nail the perfect character on the first try. A grizzled space pirate, exactly the energy you wanted.
You write a prompt for the next scene. Same pirate, different lighting. Midjourney gives you a totally different person.
This is the most common Midjourney frustration. It is also fixable.
Why the model forgets your character
Every Midjourney generation starts from scratch. The model has no memory between prompts. Your character description is a bag of attributes that gets re-rolled each time.
"Grizzled, dark hair, scar, leather jacket" matches a million faces. The model picks one. Next prompt, it picks another one. The character was never stored anywhere. It only existed in your head.
To get consistency, you have to anchor the new generation to the old one. Three tools do that. The pros use all three together.
Tool one: --cref
--cref is the real character lock. You point Midjourney at a previous image and say "make the character look like this one."
/imagine a grizzled space pirate captain, on the bridge of his
ship, holographic star map, cinematic lighting
--cref https://i.imgur.com/yourFirstGen.jpg
--cw 75
Two flags:
--creftakes an image URL. Use a Midjourney-generated image or a clean character reference photo.--cwis character weight, 0 to 100. 100 means strict face lock. Default is 100. If your body keeps looking the same as the reference (same pose, same outfit), drop--cwto around 50. That keeps the face but lets the body vary.
The most common mistake here is cropping the reference too tight. Midjourney needs to see the full face and shoulders to get a strong lock. A close-up of just the eyes gives bad results.
Tool two: --sref
--sref locks the visual style. Lighting, color palette, illustration technique. Not the character itself.
Use it with --cref when you want both face consistency and scene consistency:
/imagine a grizzled space pirate captain on the bridge
--cref [URL of character]
--sref [URL of style reference]
--cw 75 --sw 200
--sw is style weight, 0 to 1000. The default of 100 works for most cases. Bump to 300 or higher for stricter style matching.
Tool three: a character sheet block
Even with --cref, vague descriptions drift. The fewer choices you leave the model, the more consistent the output.
Compare these:
Bad:
grizzled space pirate, dark hair, scar
Good:
weathered 47-year-old human male, deep tan skin, salt-and-pepper short-cropped hair, prominent diagonal scar across left eyebrow, narrow brown eyes, broken nose, neatly trimmed graying goatee, broad shoulders, 6'1", muscular but not bulky, brown leather longcoat with worn brass buttons, three rings on left hand
Every attribute the second version locks down is an attribute the model no longer randomizes. The pros write the character description once, save it as a snippet, and prepend it to every new scene prompt.
The pro workflow
- Spend five to ten generations getting your hero character right. Upscale the best one and save the URL.
- Write the character sheet block once. Save it where you can paste it again.
- For every new scene: paste the character sheet block, then the scene description, then
--cref <URL> --cw 75 --sref <style URL> --sw 200. - For dialog scenes with multiple characters: generate each character separately first, then combine with
--crefstacking (Midjourney v7 supports two cref URLs).
This sounds like a lot of setup. It is. Once you have done it for one character, the marginal cost of new scenes is almost zero.
Things even the pro workflow cannot fix
- Side profile to front view: the model is guessing at the unseen half of the face. For animation or comic use, generate front, three-quarter, side, and back views in one batch so they share a generation context.
- Aging the same character:
--creflocks the current face. To age or de-age, generate a new "younger" or "older" base separately and use that as the reference for those scenes. - Hands: still hands. Negative-prompt them (
no extra fingers, no malformed hands) and accept some reroll rate.
A faster way to check
Paste a Midjourney prompt into FixMyPrompt with image mode on. The rubric flags missing character anchors, vague subject specificity, missing style anchors across a series, and conflicting modifiers. The rewrite assembles the character sheet block and suggests cref and sref weights.
Three free image-prompt reports per day. No signup.