The Anatomy Of An AI Image Prompt

Crafting The Perfect Formula for Images and Art

made by author using Ideogram

Understanding how to write a good prompt will help you in getting the output you are looking for.

While some good UI tools can write prompts for you, the ability to change, fine-tune, and craft your own prompts is a skill that will serve you well. You may have heard of this referred to as “prompt crafting” or “prompt engineering.”

Of course, it's entirely possible to get some amazing results without following any guidelines at all. I’ve seen some beautiful images rendered from just a simple word or phrase. However, if you want consistency and the ability to improve your output, you will need to learn how AI responds to language patterns.

In this article, I would like to show you the thought process I use when writing a prompt. I am also writing this agnostic to any specific AI art tool, as while there might be differences in the syntax between the different tools, the writing approach is largely the same.

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Crafting Your Prompt

I like to think of the anatomy of the prompt in four distinct groupings and a specific order (note the order affects how AI prioritizes the output).

1. Content type

2. Description

3. Style

4. Composition

Let’s take a look at each of them in the process of writing out a prompt.

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1. Content type

When you approach creating a piece of artwork, the first thing to think about is what type of artwork you want to achieve, is it a Photograph, Drawing, Sketch, or 3D render?

So the prompt would start with…

A photograph of...

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2. Description

a description refers to defining the subject, subject attributes, and the environment/scene. The more descriptive you can be with the use of adjectives the better the output.

So a simple description of a subject might be…

A photograph of a wolf

And the result would be something like this…

But a better description would be to add subject attributes along with the environment/scene descriptions.

A photograph of an angry full-bodied wolf in the foggy woods

And we get this…

In addition to the text description, you can also reference an image and the AI model would use that image as visual inspiration. Like this…

http://www.wolfsite.com/wolf.jpg A photograph of an angry full-bodied wolf in the foggy woods

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3. Style

The art style plays a huge factor in the rendition, and I like to think of style in three sub-categories:

Lighting, Detail, and Art styles.

Here are some words you can use for lighting:

accent lighting, backlight, blacklight, blinding light, candlelight, concert lighting, crepuscular rays, direct sunlight, dusk, Edison bulb, electric arc, fire, fluorescent, glowing, glowing radioactively, glow-stick, lava glow, moonlight, natural lighting, neon lamp, nightclub lighting, nuclear waste glow, quantum dot display, spotlight, strobe, sunlight, ultraviolet, dramatic lighting, dark lighting, soft lighting

The detail of an artwork is not just about sharpness but also derives from the specific camera lenses or digital rendering engines.

Here are some words you can use for detail:

highly detailed, grainy, realistic, unreal engine, octane render, bokeh, vray, houdini render, quixel megascans, depth of field (or dof), arnold render, 8k uhd, raytracing, cgi, lumen reflections, cgsociety, ultra realistic, volumetric fog, overglaze, analog photo, polaroid, 100mm, film photography, dslr, cinema4d, studio quality

Art styles can be descriptions of different techniques or can be defined as historical art genres.

Here are some words for historical art styles:

Abstract, Medieval art, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, post-Expression, Cubism, Futurism, Art Deco, Abstract Expressionism, Contemporary, pop art, surrealism, fantasy

Here are some words for artistic techniques and materials:

Digital art, digital painting, color page, featured on pixiv (for anime/manga), trending on artstation, precise line-art, tarot card, character design, concept art, symmetry, golden ratio, evocative, award winning, shiny, smooth, surreal, divine, celestial, elegant, oil painting, soft, fascinating, fine art

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Now, let’s add some styles to our wolf prompt.

A photograph of an angry full-bodied wolf in the foggy woods, dusk, low-lighting

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Here is another example using different lighting and details:

A photograph of an angry full-bodied wolf in the foggy woods, black and white, high-contrast, dramatic lighting

You can see that the style has a lot of influence on the generated output.

In addition to lighting and details in images, you can reference historical art styles.

A photograph of an angry full-bodied wolf in the foggy woods, pop art

Here are some examples of different art styles and you can see how much influence the styles have on the output:

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4. Composition

The remaining element is the composition which refers to…

Aspect ratio, camera view, and resolution.

The aspect ratio is really important when you are targeting specific purposes. If you were creating a banner, that would be a different aspect ratio than if you were creating a screen saver.

This is a great resource that shows you how the different aspect ratios apply to different sizes.

Camera view is all about the perspective of the image. Will your artwork be close-up, wide-angle, fisheye, etc…

The question to ask is what is the viewer’s perspective?

These are some words you can use for camera view:

ultra wide-angle, wide-angle, portrait, aerial view, low angle shot, high angle shot, massive scale, street level view, landscape, panoramic, bokeh, fisheye, dutch angle, low angle, extreme long-shot, long shot, close-up, extreme close-up

Resolution would apply to the detail, quality, and size you are aiming for. Words you can use for resolution might be as follows:

highly detailed, depth of field (or dof), 4k, 8k uhd, ultra realistic, studio quality. 

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Now let’s add a camera perspective and aspect ratio to the prompt:

A photograph of an angry full-bodied wolf in the foggy woods, viewed through a fisheye lens, aspect ratio is 16x9

Now you can see that it starts to get really interesting when you apply various perspectives, styles, and camera angles.

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The Anatomy Breakdown

Here is the anatomy of an image prompt:

And here is the anatomy of an art/illustration prompt:

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Prompt Enhancers

While the formula works great to get all the proper categories in the prompt, enhancing the prompt by adding more detail will often get you better results.

Some Image Gens will do this by default, while others provide an option to do so. You can also ask ChatGPT or Claude to add more detail to your basic prompt.

ChatGPT via DALLE will auto-enhance the prompt by default as shown here:

And some Image Gens like Ideogram have built-in enhancers you can turn on. This is Ideogram’s ‘Magic Prompt’ feature:

Final Thought

I hope this journey through the creation of a prompt was helpful for you.

In summary, start by using the formula that contains Content type, Description, Style and Composition, and then enhance it with further detail. Using this method will ensure you get a great image.