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Prompt Engineering

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Ben Rugg edited this page Nov 30, 2022 · 4 revisions

In AI image generation, the prompt text is the most important focus. Small additions or changes can make a big impact on the final image. For example, adding a single word like "photorealistic", "painting", or "anime" will completely change the result.

Prompt modifiers or keywords are just regular descriptive words that you add to the subject of your prompt. There's nothing magic about the input, and there is a lot of room for creativity.

Getting good at writing prompts is a skill like any other. It's worth thinking of it this way, and devoting some time to learning this skill. The best AI art is coming from people who have dived deep on learning prompt engineering.

Here are a few categories of prompt modifiers to try:

  • Descriptive terms ("futuristic", "elegant", "mysterious", "bright")
  • Artists ("Picasso", "Thomas Kinkade", "Annie Leibovitz")
  • Art Styles ("brutalism", "impressionism", "bauhaus")
  • Art Techniques ("stipple", "watercolor", "cel-shaded")
  • Colors ("triadic colors", "blue and yellow", "contrasting")
  • Art Communities ("Artstation", "Deviantart", "Unsplash")

Negative prompts:

Negative prompts can significantly improve image quality. For certain models (like Stable Diffusion 2.0), they seem to be even more important.

You can use a negative prompt to remove certain elements, styles or colors from an image. For example, removing "moss" from an "elven forest" or "fog" from a landscape, as detailed in this quick guide to negative prompts.

For Stable Diffusion 2.0, adding "ugly, boring, bad art" as negative descriptors can have a big impact. See this negative prompt analysis as an example.

Stable Diffusion 2.0:

Stable Diffusion 2.0 was trained differently from the previous models. This results in a new way that prompts need to be written. Two key changes are 1) artist names and art styles don't produce quality results anymore 2) negative prompts are extremely important.

See this article about negative prompts and this video about negative prompts as a starting point.

More resources:

Also, I'd love to mention my personal favorite AI community, and the place I got started with Stable Diffusion. NightCafe is an AI generator and a mini social network for sharing your images and discovering other artists. It doesn't connect to Blender in any way, but it's very fun to use: https://nightcafe.studio/

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