Testing Midjourney v8.1: Speed, Moodboards, and Mixed Results

More Testing of Midjourney v8.1 and my early unbiased observation

Pros:-

- The annoying black bars are gone.  So far I have not seen the black bars propping up as they do every so often in v8 alpha

- Moodboards are more important than ever for you to control how your image looks.  I like cinematic images and Images 1 and 2 here are made with moodboards.

- The HD is very fast (and cheaper), but I suspect that it is still more expensive than generating standard images under v8 alpha or v7

Cons:-

- A lot of images (if we do not apply moodboards) turned out to look more like paintings and illustrations than photographs.  This is particularly obvious when you generate futuristic city or an outer planet (see images 3 and 4) even if you prompt for a photograph.

- I see people commenting that v8.1 looks less cinematic and I also note MJ's response that sref and moodboards will give you the cinematic look.  This goes back to my earlier observation that you need a good sref or moodboard to achieve what you want to generate in mind

Need more testing....