AI Glossary

Style Reference (--sref)

Midjourney's --sref parameter applies a consistent visual aesthetic from a reference image or saved style code to new generations. Style references enable brand consistency across prompts by decoupling visual identity from prompt text, allowing teams to enforce approved aesthetics at scale.

Style references solve a core governance problem in AI image generation: maintaining visual consistency when multiple team members generate content. Without --sref, even identical prompts produce visually inconsistent results because aesthetic interpretation varies with each generation. A style reference anchors the visual treatment to a known baseline.

Professional teams build governed style kits — curated collections of approved --sref codes organized by tier (brand-core, project-specific, experimental). Each reference is tested against standard prompts to document its visual behavior. The challenge is that style references are opaque codes with no inherent description, so without a searchable library linking codes to visual examples, teams lose track of their approved styles within weeks.

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