Image Prompting — Practical Guide [10/01/2026]
How to craft clear, ethical prompts for AI image generation and produce high-quality, non-explicit results.
Overview
This guide covers prompt-writing techniques, composition and style tips, safety and consent considerations, and troubleshooting strategies for creating high-quality, non-explicit images with generative tools. Use these practices to get consistent, ethical results while respecting legal and community standards.
1. Prompt Fundamentals
- Be specific: Describe the subject, setting, mood, and camera/viewpoint. Example: "A cinematic portrait of an elderly woman knitting on a sunlit porch, 50mm lens, warm golden hour lighting."
- Use concise modifiers: Add style tokens like photorealistic, watercolor, low-poly, or artist references when appropriate and allowed.
- Control composition: Include framing and perspective: close-up, wide-angle, bird's-eye, three-quarter view.
- Specify lighting & color: "soft rim light", "high-contrast monochrome", "muted pastel palette".
2. Ethics, Consent & Legal Considerations
Always prioritize consent, privacy, and legality. Do not attempt to recreate identifiable real people without explicit permission. Avoid generating content that violates platform policies, depicts illegal acts, or infringes on copyrights.
- Consent: Never generate images that impersonate or sexualize real individuals without consent.
- Copyright: Avoid direct copying of copyrighted artworks; prefer descriptive style references rather than exact reproductions.
- Platform rules: Check the service's content policy before generating images; follow community guidelines.
3. Style & Aesthetic Controls
Use style modifiers to steer the visual outcome. Combine multiple concise modifiers for predictable results.
- Art styles: "impressionist", "art nouveau", "cyberpunk", "mid-century illustration".
- Rendering: "photorealistic", "3D render, octane", "flat vector illustration".
- Color & mood: "muted earth tones", "neon palette, high saturation", "moody, cinematic".
4. Technical Parameters & Workflow
Many tools accept additional parameters (seed, aspect ratio, steps, guidance scale). Use them to refine reproducibility and quality.
- Aspect ratio: "16:9" for landscapes, "4:5" or "3:4" for portraits.
- Seed: Use a fixed seed to reproduce results; vary it to explore alternatives.
- Guidance/CFG: Higher values often make the image follow the prompt more strictly; lower values increase creativity.
5. Example Prompts (Safe, Non-Explicit)
Short, medium, and long examples you can adapt.
Short
Photorealistic portrait of a smiling baker, warm kitchen light, 50mm lens.
Medium
Wide-angle cityscape at dusk, rain-slick streets reflecting neon signs, cinematic, long exposure, 35mm.
Long
Illustration of a cozy reading nook by a bay window, soft afternoon light, plants on shelves, mid-century modern furniture, watercolor texture, muted pastel palette.
6. Troubleshooting & Iteration
- Unclear subject: Add concrete nouns and adjectives (e.g., "golden retriever puppy, sitting, tongue out").
- Bad anatomy or artifacts: Try "photorealistic, high detail, correct anatomy" and increase sampling steps or guidance.
- Too literal or rigid: Lower guidance scale or remove overly prescriptive tokens.
- Explore variations: Change seed, swap a style token, or rephrase the prompt to emphasize different attributes.
Accessibility & Best Practices
- Alt text: Always provide descriptive alt text for generated images when publishing to make content accessible.
- Attribution: If you used a public dataset or a tool that requires attribution, follow the license terms.
- Recordkeeping: Keep notes of prompts and parameters for reproducibility and auditing.