Midjourney

On April 30, 2026, Midjourney V8.1 dropped at midjourney.com with 4-5x faster Fast generation, native 2K HD via --hd, and 95% accuracy on complex prompts — and the Discord-only era is officially over. This article covers plan selection (Basic $10 / Standard $30 / Pro $60 / Mega $120, with Standard recommended for beginners), Fast vs Relax mode, the five-layer prompt structure (Subject->Environment->Style->Lighting->Technical), seven essential parameters (--ar/--stylize/--chaos/--hd/--raw/--q/--no), four reference features (--sref vibe / --oref subjects / Moodboards / Personalization), and three pitfalls (text rendering, MJ keeps the copyright, no API). For the "pretty image with minimum steps" demand, MJ is still the answer in 2026.

In April 2026, OpenAI's DALL·E handed off to GPT Image 2; the same month Google's Imagen 4 Ultra took the photorealism crown, and March had already brought Midjourney V8 with 5x speed and 2K HD by default. Black Forest Labs' FLUX 1.1 Pro Ultra counters at $0.04/image, Ideogram V3 hits 90-95% text accuracy, Recraft V3 owns vector and design-system output, and Adobe Firefly Image 5 plays the commercial-safety card for ad and publishing work. This article organizes the 8 major image-AI tools as of May 2026 into five strength camps (photo / text / art / commercial-safe / design system), walks through pricing models (subscription vs. pay-per-image vs. free), six use-case decision patterns, and the common traps in commercial use and copyright — grounded in independent-evaluator data and a practical viewpoint.