How to Create Stunning Photo-Realistic Portraits with Midjourney Prompts (2024)

A lot of people want to create photo-realistic Midjourney portraits, aiming for the most real-looking results possible. Interestingly, the photo-realistic image of the woman above you is not a real person – it was created by Midjourney. This introduces you to the underground world of the AI art tool Midjourney, where nearly anything you can imagine is possible with the right prompts.

Now, think about seeing that image on an Instagram feed and quickly scrolling through it. You likely wouldn’t think twice and would assume it’s a real person. Pretty insane, right?

Let’s get started. In this tutorial, I’ll assume you already have a Midjourney account. Once you’re logged in on Discord, simply type “/imagine <<prompt goes here>>”. You can use any of the prompts on this page.

To get an accurate comparison of prompts and see which produces the most stunning result, I ran all these realistic Midjourney portrait prompts at the same time, back-to-back, using “beautiful woman” in all the prompts for a fair comparison.

Prefer listening? Play the podcast version below! If not, just keep reading.

Realistic Midjourney Portrait Prompt #1: Long Edition

(Copy/Paste)
Portrait of a beautiful woman, Cinematic, Photoshoot, Shot on 25mm lens, Depth of Field, DOF, Tilt Blur, Shutter Speed 1/1000, F/22, White Balance, 32k, Super-Resolution, Megapixel, Pro Photo RGB, VR, Lonely, Good, Massive, Half rear Lighting, Backlight, Dramatic Lighting, Incandescent, Optical Fiber, Moody Lighting, Studio Lighting, Soft Lighting, Volumetric, Conte-Jour, Beautiful Lighting, Accent Lighting, Global Illumination, Screen Space Global Illumination, Ray Tracing Global Illumination, Optics, Scattering, Glowing, Shadows, Rough, Shimmering, Ray Tracing Reflections, Lumen Reflections, Screen Space Reflections, Diffraction Grading, Chromatic Aberration, GB Displacement, Scan Lines, Ray Traced, ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion, Anti-Aliasing, FKAA, TXAA, RTX, SSAO, Shaders, OpenGL-Shaders, GLSL-Shaders, Post Processing, Post-Production, Cell Shading, Tone Mapping, CGI, VFX, SFX, insanely detailed and intricate, hyper maximalist, elegant, super detailed, dynamic pose, volumetric, ultra-detailed, intricate details, super detailed, ambient –v 6.0

AI Output:

Starting things off with a bang, this Midjourney portrait is incredibly realistic, and in my opinion, it’s not even the best one on this page.

The next prompt will have fewer words in it. But sometimes, less is more, right? Let’s see if the next Midjourney prompt delivers something even more realistic.

Realistic Midjourney Portrait Prompt #2: Short Edition

(Copy/Paste)
Portrait of a beautiful woman, cinematic, Photoshoot, Shot on 25mm lens, Depth of Field, Tilt Blur, Shutter Speed 1/1000, F/22, White Balance, 32k, Super-Resolution, Pro Photo RGB, Half rear Lighting, Backlight, Dramatic Lighting, Incandescent, Soft Lighting, Volumetric, Conte-Jour, Global Illumination, Screen Space Global Illumination, Scattering, Shadows, Rough, Shimmering, Lumen Reflections, Screen Space Reflections, Diffraction Grading, Chromatic Aberration, GB Displacement, Scan Lines, Ambient Occlusion, Anti-Aliasing, FKAA, TXAA, RTX, SSAO, OpenGL-Shader’s, Post Processing, Post-Production, Cell Shading, Tone Mapping, CGI, VFX, SFX, insanely detailed and intricate, hyper maximalist, elegant, dynamic pose, photography, volumetric, ultra-detailed, intricate details, super detailed, ambient –v 6.0

AI Output:

Even better, this prompt was essentially a scaled-down version of the first one, and yet it worked better. So, I guess less was more in this case.

Now for the real fun…

Let’s say you want to create a custom portrait of someone with brown hair, green eyes, and who is of Hispanic descent. You want your subject against a snowy mountain background.

To do this, we’re simply going to inject our description of the girl at the beginning of the prompt.

Realistic Midjourney Portrait Prompt #3: Custom Edition

(Copy/Paste)
Beautiful woman, brown hair, green eyes, hispanic, snow mountain background, modern, cinematic, post production, depth of field, cinema photography, cinema, color grading, professional color grading, 55 mm lens, Exquisite detail, sharp-focus, intricately-detailed, long exposure time, f/8, ISO 100, Shutter speed 1/125, diffuse-back-light, award winning photography, realistic photography, hyper realistic, unreal engine, realistic lens flare, real lighting, inscriptions, hyper realistic, 8k, detailed, photography, Cinematic Lighting, Studio Lighting, Beautiful Lighting, Accent Lighting, Global Illumination, Screen Space Global Illumination, Ray Tracing Global Illumination, Optics, Scattering, Glowing, no Shadows, Rough, Shimmering, Ray Tracing Reflections, Lumen Reflections, Screen Space Reflections, Diffraction Grading, GB Displacement, Scan Lines, Ray Traced, Ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion, Anti-Aliasing, FKAA, TXAA, RTX, SSAO, Shaders, OpenGL-Shaders, GLSL-Shaders, Post Processing, Post-Production, Cel Shading, Tone Mapping, CGI, VFX, SFX, insanely detailed and intricate, hypermaximalist, elegant, hyper realistic, super detailed –v 6.0

AI Output:

It looks to me like a beautiful woman with brown hair and green eyes, of Hispanic descent, against a snowy mountain backdrop. Midjourney listened! And it didn’t forget the realism.

As for the winner, I would say it’s a tie between #2 and #3. The lighting in #2 is impeccable. The woman’s eyes in #3 are almost flawlessly real.

Wrapping it up

You can get as creative as you want with these prompts. Change the descriptions to whatever you’d like and see what pops out. 

Also, experiment with removing some of the keywords, as well as adding more, to see what works for you. The possibilities of Midjourney AI art are endless.

You might think these prompts are extremely long, making them seem like antiquated pieces of word salad, but think again. All of these images were produced with Midjourney v6 in January 2024.

Now that you’ve made realistic portraits, go ahead and discover how to make anime-style images with Niji mode.Please let me know in the comments below which realistic Midjourney portrait prompt worked best for you to get the most photo-realistic results. Also, tell me how much you loved this post (even if you didn’t).