Mondrian Zoom
Mondrian Variations
Midjourney released version 5.2 yesterday. Besides stylistic improvements, one of the most exciting feature is the “zoom out” feature. Users in Stable Diffusion have long used something similar which is called “outpainting”. The two are similar in practice. Essentially given an image, you would can ask the AI engine to generate the space outside of the image. Midjourney’s implementation is simpler, where it simply zooms out the image by 1.5x, 2x or a custom amount.
Similarly, you could do the same with Photoshop AI, which I have written about before. Stable Diffusion and Photoshop are both GUI programs, so in some ways it’s easier for them to implement more flexibility with where you’d like to outpaint. Midjourney exists as a Discord bot, so they have dialed down the customization and simply offer users the ability to zoom out by specific amount from the center. This lower level of customization is not necessarily bad, it’s actually quite nice to not have to spend time selecting areas to fill, which by far is the one time-consuming part of this process.
Through several tries, and based on common sense, images that are not intrinsically “framed” tend to give better results, so I also took the opportunity to extend the Mondrian Variations, since these tend to give intersting visuals at the edge. In particular, one generations with lots of patterns in the background gives the most impressive results, so I’ve made a 5-level zoom out video to showcase that.
Text prompts with Midjourney v5.2.
Video Example
Abstract painting in the style of Mondrian, using five different levels of zooming out from Midjourney v5.2 to go from close up to extreme outpaint effect. The images created did have some artifacts, and the seams don’t always match, but I used some masks with feature inside After Effects to correct some of them. They’re not perfect — some of the source images have black bars and when that happens, the images might not have been generated exactly at 200% zoom. Still, it’s a pretty good tech demo for the state that it is in right now.
Set 1
One of my favorite zoomed out images during the run. These geometric shapes just kept on bringing new depths and visual delights as you zoom out, with very nice negative space as balance to the strong sharp edges of shapes made with primary colors.
Set 2
The zoomed out version is still nice, though not much was added to it.
Set 3
With a clearly defined shape running across the painting, the zoomed out version of this painting kept the same motif and created an interesting outpaint.
