Tips for good prompts

With all those options of AIs, choosing the right prompt can become quite complex. Overall, they yield the same results, but it's the details that differ. I didn't have the time to try them all myself. I searched for sources for the best prompts, and those sources had sources too... so here are a few sources that provide tips on how to create the best prompts.

Because the sources are all in English, you would get the impression that that is the only possible language, but that turns out to be incorrect. See the result here for a Dutch breakfast, written in Dutch: "Uitgebreid ontbijt, Hagelslag op volkorenbrood, pindakaas, jam, glas melk, [style charactaristics in English]" by Stable Diffusion v1.5. Unfortunately, the AI doesn't know what hagelslag is, but otherwise it comes pretty close.

I have not yet tried to write the style characteristics in Dutch. Because everyone learns from each other in this field, and most of them communicate in English, I also stick to English terms here.

On to the most comprehensive guide to writing prompts.

Overall, the structure of your text prompt is as follows:

[subject]  [in surroundings]  [medium]  [art movement]  [in style of]  [POV]  [light]  [colour]  [quality words]

Not everything needs to be filled in. [medium] can also be placed at the very front if its execution is most important. The other aspects should also be moved further forward if the impact is too low for your liking.

Examples:

• subject = person, animal, landscape, etc. doing something, or wearing something, or being something (happy, sad, romantic), e.g. 'happy panda eats bamboo'
• in surroundings = in his room, on the mountain, in the woods, indoor, outdoor, underwater, space
• medium = photo, painting, chalk drawing, watercolor, clay, crochet, origami, or other choice, but be specific
• art movement = impressionism, film noir, baroque, post-apocalyptic, minimalism, modern art, ink painting, movie poster, naïve art, pointillism, pop art, splash art, storybook illustration, street art, surrealism, Ukiyo-e ... and this is just a small selection of the possibilities
• in the style of : by Vermeer, Van Gogh, Arthur Rackham, Hayao Miyazaki , Alphonse Mucha, Albrecht Dürer. ... this list is in principle endless but not every artist is equally well known; Studio names also work well: Studio Ghibli, Pixar, Disney
• POV (point of view): front, overhead, side, close-up, satellite, macro, telephoto, fish-eye lens, polaroid, long exposure, Gopro, drone photo, selfie
• light: soft, ambient, ring light, neon, at night, sun, cinematic, sun rays, sundown, sunrise
• colour: vibrant, dark, pastel, muted, monochrome, tetradic, triadic, warm colors, cool colors, and the colors themselves of course
• quality words: as mentioned in the paragraph above.

Experiment

Everything affects everything. If you choose artists with a detailed style, it is no longer necessary to ask for hyperdetailed, or intricately detailed. If your subject doesn't match the artists, an AI like Stable Diffusion will fall back on a photorealistic style. It makes sense to experiment extensively with this. The style words that work well for one subject in the prompt may therefore work very differently for another subject.

Note that when changing the proportions of your image (square to landscape for example) everything can change, even with the same prompt and seed. The AI are trained on a standard size of 512x512 pixels, so square. You do get equivalent colors and composition with landscape or portrait formats.

Always keep in mind that the AI is trained with 2000 years of art. It can be very cumbersome to properly represent a modern subject in a very old medium. Sketch, for example, will draw in grayscale, and will present your subject in a modern way - think of 'car' as 'Tesla'; painting gives a colorful image, but a more old-fashioned representation of your subject - 'car' quickly becomes a 1960s model.

On Aiwiki.ai, the current world of AI is explored and explained. Relevant here is https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/Prompt, where it explains how prompts work, similar to the explanation above. The website also provides a list of prompt generators if you need a little help or inspiration.

• Midjourney Prompt Generator: unofficial Midjourney prompt builder, on the HuggingFace platform. It complements your subject with extra details and control commands such as --ar 3:2 (aspect ratio).
• Phraser: assists in making strong prompts for Midjourney and DALL-E. Even if you don't log in (and don't pay), you can look at example images and the texts used, to get inspired.
• MidJourney Prompt Helper: text-to-image prompt builder developed for Midjourney and DALL-E. It walks you through the prompt-building step by step by letting you click pictures of the styles you want. If you take out the control commands for Midjourney, it also becomes usable for Stable Diffusion.
• Drawing Prompt Generator: helps draftsmen get ideas, even if they don't work with AI. This is only aimed at the topic of your prompt.
• Promptomania Builder: prompt builder for various AI art generators. It works for most CLIP and VQCAN based models. Again, click on images to specify your style.
• MidJourney Random Commands Generator: unofficial Midjourney prompt generator for complex outputs. This helps especially with writing the control commands that can be given to Midjourney.
• Lexica.art: Lexica offers its own Stable Diffusion AI, but you can also search in the already created images. You can see the prompt for each picture, so you can learn a lot here.

Through several smaller sources, I came across other prompt generators. Here the most interesting.

• CLIP Interrogator and CLIP interrogator2 are both on the HuggingFace platform. Here you upload an image and the tool tries to figure out what would be a good prompt to create new images like this one.
• OpenAI ChatGPT This AI Chatbot can also be used to design prompts for AI. Use "give the adjectives of something...", "describe something in detail..." to get some keywords. Please specify for which AI you want to use this.
• Random AI Prompt Generator gives you random prompts, mainly targeting Midjourney.
• Clip front works by turning the text into a CLIP embedding and then using that embedding to show more images and/or keywords.
• ArtHub.ai has a prompt library where you can find inspiration for each style.
• PromptBase Prompt Marketplace for DALL·E, GPT-3, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion. Here you can buy prompts, but this is not very useful, because the execution of your prompt changes if the subject changes too much.