A trick to place the subject off to either side using Gen AI

For my AI-based pitch deck review tool, I had the harebrained idea to generate a custom cover image for every review. The problem is that to do that, I needed 16:9 aspect ratio images where the subject is off to the left, so the text can be on the right. It turns out it’s fiercely difficult to do that with prompts alone: Try as I might, I couldn’t get the AI to place people or objects on one side, and leave copy space on the other.

MidJourney won’t place a subject where you want it consistently — in this case, off to the left along the ‘rule of thirds’ line. I found a workaround, though.

But I came up with a workaround: Instead of the images failing about half the time, I am generating much wider images (at the moment, I’m using 3:1 aspect ratio), and then using a script to automatically crop it down to 16:9, cropping off the right side of the image. In the vast majority of cases, that works, resulting in images that look great, with the subject on the left-hand side of the image.

Here’s a few samples:

A selection of cropped images, and a few of the uncropped originals.