Enlarge / Midjourney 5.2 allows “zooming out” on synthesized images. The original synthetic image is shown in the red dotted box here. (credit: Midjourney)
On Thursday, Midjourney unveiled version 5.2 of its AI-powered image synthesis model, which includes a new “zoom out” feature that allows maintaining a central synthesized image while automatically building out a larger scene around it, simulating zooming out with a camera lens.
Similar to outpainting—an AI imagery technique introduced by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 in August 2022—Midjourney’s zoom-out feature can take an existing AI-generated image and expand its borders while keeping its original subject centered in the new image. But unlike DALL-E and Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature, you can’t select a custom image to expand. At the moment, v5.2’s zoom-out only works on images generated within Midjourney, a subscription AI image-generator service.
On the Midjourney Discord server (still the official interface for Midjourney, although plans are underway