How to Write Image Prompts That Actually Work

Most weak prompts fail the same way: they are full of evaluations rather than instructions. "Beautiful", "stunning", "high quality", "masterpiece" — these tell the model how you would like to feel about the result, not what to put in the frame.

Replace every evaluation with a decision

Instead of "beautiful lighting", write "low sun from behind the subject, long shadows". Instead of "high quality", name the medium: "large-format film, fine grain". The model can act on the second version.

Order carries weight

Terms near the front of the prompt carry more weight in every current model, so the subject belongs first and the incidental details last. If your prompt opens with three sentences of atmosphere, the subject is competing with them.

Negative prompts are not an afterthought

On Stable Diffusion a short, targeted negative — extra fingers, watermark, text, blurry, oversaturated — does more for the result than another twenty words of positive description.

Say what the frame contains, not what it feels like

A useful test before you press generate: could a stranger draw this without asking you a question? "A cosy cafe scene, warm and inviting" fails — how many people, what time of day, seen from where? "Interior of a small cafe at dusk, two people at a window table seen from across the room, warm tungsten light against blue exterior light" passes, and it passes for exactly the same reason the model can render it.

Length is not the point. A twelve-word prompt of concrete nouns beats a sixty-word prompt of atmosphere every time, because every word in the first one is doing work and most of the words in the second are competing with each other for weight.

Change one axis at a time

Changing style, lighting and composition together tells you the new image is different but not which change caused it. When you write an image prompt with us you get five variations that each move a different axis, which makes that comparison easy to actually run. If you would rather start from a picture you like, image to text prompt gives you its six axes to edit.