Prompt Enginering 101: Generate inspiring photos

Have you ever seen a photo and said, "How the hell did they do that? How can I do something like that?" Well, the trick is to speak the language of AI.

This language is called "prompting." It's simply creating a series of instructions for the model to understand and generate the desired output. Here's an example with a photo:

Creating the perfect prompt is a challenge, but with this practical guide you can improve your results immediately.

Before you start, keep in mind that generating images with AI also requires a bit of luck. So don't be disappointed if you don't get it right the first time. Try again and you will see that little by little the results will improve.

💡 Tips:

• Be clear and specific when describing what you want.
• Use a negative Prompt to exclude what you don't want.
• Adjust your Prompt according to the results you get.
• Save seeds that give you good results (optional).

Prompt structure

There is a foundation that can be very helpful and will give you very good results. For example, let's look at the structure of our previous photo:

Beautiful painting (Art Type) of small old farm in Switzerland (Subject) by Abbott Fuller Graves (Art Style), view from afar, medieval, highly detailed environment, intricate, rich in details, oil painting, heavy strokes (Modifiers)

The prompt has a structure that allows the AI to understand what you want and can create great results.

This is the basic format we use:

Art Type + Subject + Art Style (Artist name or category) + Modifiers (Separed by commas)

Use this database to improve your prompts. HERE

This format works in all models including Stable Difussion, Midjourney, Dall-E, and more.

Let's see the prompt process

This process is like putting together a puzzle by adding pieces as we go along, until it resembles the image we want to achieve.

We will see how the parameters affect the result of our image and how we can improve it.

We start with a simple instruction.

Beautiful painting of small old farm in Switzerland

Looks good isn’t it?

Let's see what else we can do

Beautiful painting of small old farm in Switzerland by Van Gogh

"Much better! Now you can see that adding an art style can have a huge impact on the result

This could be a painting made by Van Gogh himself, right?

Beautiful painting of small old farm in Switzerland, sepia filter

If we remove the Van Gogh style and apply a sepia filter, we will see a much browner color palette.

What about the negative prompt?

The negative prompt is used to remove or exclude unwanted elements in our photo, such as a blurred image, a figure with two heads, or with foreign objects.

By using a negative prompt, we can obtain a much clearer and more realistic image.

Prompt: Beautiful painting of small old farm in Switzerland, 8k, high definition, hyper realistic, highly detailed, UHD, rich in details.

Negative prompt: 2 heads, elongated body, 2 faces, cropped image, out of frame, draft, deformed hands, signature, watermark, twisted fingers, double image, long neck, extra limb, ugly, poorly drawn hands, missing limb, ugly, over saturated, grain, blurry, bad anatomy, disfigured, poorly drawn face, mutation, disconnected limbs, out of focus, long body, disgusting, poorly drawn, mutilated, mangled, extra fingers, gross proportions, missing arms, mutated hands, mutilated hands, cloned face, missing legs

As we can see, every time we add a parameter like '8k, high definition, hyper realistic' we will see that the detail and realism increases, and we will get closer to our final goal.

Finally, if we add more parameters to the prompt and combine it with a good negative prompt, we will obtain outstanding results like the following:

Prompt: Beautiful painting of small old farm in Switzerland, view from afar, medieval, highly detailed environment, intricate, rich in details, environment by Abbott Fuller Graves, oil painting, heavy strokes

Now you can fully understand the prompt we used and why it gave those results and I can guarantee that the example prompt above will give you something very nice.

We are almost 100% of being a prompts engineer.

Only more technical adjustments, such as weights, number of steps, prompt guidance, etc., are needed.

But without those details you can do great works, it's just a matter of practicing and adjusting those parameters well!

Just practice! Combine different styles and artists, and see what you can achieve. Use different styles and test your imagination.

Use different styles and test your imagination.

Keep exploring the world of AI

-- Santiago