Editing Midjourney Images in GIMP Step by Step

A generated image is a starting point. The work that makes it usable is ordinary image editing, and it follows the same order nearly every time. Once you have done it three or four times it takes about ten minutes.

Before You Start

Two minutes here saves a lot of frustration later.

1. Download the largest version the generator offers. You cannot add detail back later.
2. Keep the original file untouched in its own folder. Generators do not repeat exactly, so this is your only copy.
3. Open it in GIMP and immediately go to File, Save As to create an XCF. Everything from here happens in that file.
4. Right click the layer and choose Add Alpha Channel if it is not already there. Without it, erasing paints the background colour instead of clearing pixels.

Step 1: Look at It Properly First

Zoom to 100 percent by pressing 1, and pan around the whole image before you touch anything. Generated images hide their errors at fit to screen size. Make a mental list of what needs fixing.

Five things are wrong in nearly every generated image:

Step 2: Repair the Errors

Do this before anything else, while the file is still at its original size. Repairs made at a small size and then enlarged look far better than repairs painted onto an already upscaled image.

Work on a duplicate layer, not the original. Press Shift+Ctrl+D to duplicate, and name it "repairs". If you go too far, you delete that layer instead of undoing forty steps.

The full technique is covered in fixing hands and faces in AI images, and the clone tool guide covers the basics if you have not used it before.

Step 3: Deal With the Text

Never keep generated lettering. Image models learn letter shapes, not spelling, so what looks like a word at thumbnail size falls apart at 100 percent.

1. Select the area holding the fake text with Free Select.
2. Feather by three pixels.
3. Clone or heal the background over it until the text is gone.
4. Add a real text layer with the Text tool, press T.
5. Match the perspective with Tools, Transform Tools, Perspective if the text sits on an angled surface.

Adding text in GIMP covers the text tool itself, and installing fonts covers getting the right typeface in place first.

Step 4: Grade the Colour

Generated images tend to have a particular look: evenly lit, slightly oversaturated, and a bit flat in the shadows. Three adjustments fix most of it.

1. Colors, Curves. Pull a gentle S shape. Drag the lower quarter down slightly and the upper quarter up slightly. This adds contrast without crushing anything.
2. Colors, Hue-Saturation. Drop saturation by five to ten. Almost every generated image is slightly too vivid.
3. Colors, Color Balance. Push the shadows very slightly towards blue and the highlights very slightly towards orange. This is the standard cinematic split and it makes an image feel photographed.

The colour correction guide goes through Curves properly. Use the colour palette generator on a reference photograph if you want to match a specific look.

Step 5: Break Up the Plastic Look

The single most effective trick, and it takes thirty seconds. Real photographs have noise. Generated images have almost none, and that absence is a big part of what makes them read as artificial.

1. Add a new transparent layer above everything.
2. Run Filters, Noise, RGB Noise with a low amount, around 0.05.
3. Set the layer mode to Overlay and the opacity to about 15 percent.
4. Zoom to 100 percent and adjust until you can only just see it.

If you are not sure what Overlay does, the blend mode visualizer lets you flip through every mode on your own images.

Step 6: Crop and Compose

Generated compositions are usually centred and a bit static. A crop often improves the image more than any amount of retouching.

Crop to the ratio your destination needs, not to whatever looks nice. The social media size reference has the exact numbers, and the image cropper has snap presets for all of them.

Step 7: Upscale, Sharpen, Export

Order matters here, and getting it wrong is the most common mistake in the whole workflow.

1. Image, Flatten Image on a duplicate of your XCF, so the layered master survives.
2. If you need it larger, Image, Scale Image with interpolation set to NoHalo. Or use the image upscaler, which does the same thing plus a sharpening pass.
3. Filters, Enhance, Sharpen (Unsharp Mask) with a radius near 2 and a modest amount. Once only.
4. File, Export As. PNG for anything with flat colour or transparency, JPG at quality 85 to 90 for photographs.

A Quick Checklist

• Original file kept somewhere safe and untouched
• Working in an XCF, not overwriting the download
• Alpha channel added to the layer
• Hands, faces and artefacts repaired on a duplicate layer
• Generated text removed and replaced with a real text layer
• Curves, saturation and colour balance adjusted
• A little grain added on an Overlay layer
• Cropped to the ratio your destination needs
• Scaled, then sharpened once, then exported

Common Questions

Can GIMP open the file Midjourney gives me?

Yes. Downloads are PNG or JPG and both open directly. If yours saved as WebP, GIMP 2.10 and later open that too, and the article on WebP downloads covers converting it.

Should I upscale before or after editing?

After. Editing at the smaller size is faster, and enlarging afterwards means one resampling pass rather than two. Sharpen last, once.

Why does my edit look obviously pasted in?

Almost always an edge problem. A hard cut against soft generated pixels reads as fake immediately. Feather the selection by two or three pixels before you paint.

Do I need to keep the original?

Yes, and separately from your XCF. Generators do not repeat exactly, so if you overwrite the original you cannot get it back.