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Image prompts that work
Six slots that decide whether a generated image is usable, plus the two things you never generate and the licence question a client will ask.
Six slots, in this order
A prompt that gets used on the second try has six slots. Yara writes them in the same order every time, which is why she can tell what to change when the result is wrong.
| Slot | What goes in it | Fix it when |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | The one noun and its state | You got the wrong thing |
| Medium | Photograph, gouache, 3D render, engraving | It looks generic |
| Light | Direction, hardness, colour temperature | It looks flat or plastic |
| Lens or scale | 24mm, macro, isometric, flat | The perspective fights the layout |
| Composition | Where the subject sits, where the space is | It will not take a headline |
| Palette and mood | Two or three colours, one feeling word | It clashes with the brand |
Adjectives without a slot do nothing. "Stunning", "premium" and "modern" are the words that produce the image everybody else got.
Let Claude write the prompts
Yara does not write ten prompt variants by hand. She gives Claude the direction and the brand guide and asks for the variants, because the difference between them is a design decision and the typing is not.
Here is direction two from our creative brief and the client's brand guide. Write ten image prompts for a generator, each on one line, in this slot order: subject, medium, light, lens, composition, palette. Vary only medium and light across the first five, and only composition across the last five, so I can tell which change did what. Add a short negative list for each. No brand names, no living artists' names, no real people.
I am attaching an image I like from a mood board. Describe what is actually doing the work in it: the medium, the light direction and hardness, the lens behaviour, the composition and the palette. Then write me a prompt that would produce a different subject with the same treatment. Do not name the photographer, the brand or the campaign.
Take this prompt and give me eight variations that keep the subject and the palette fixed and change one named thing each: light direction, light hardness, lens, camera height, crop, background material, colour temperature, and amount of negative space. Number them and say in four words what each one is testing.
What you never generate
Two things stay off the list, whatever the deadline. Real people, including the client's founder and anyone recognisable, because likeness is not yours to make. And competitors' marks, product shapes or trade dress, because a pitch deck with a rival's logo hallucinated onto a bottle is the slide that ends the meeting. If a mockup needs a real face or a real product, shoot it or licence it.
The third rule is quieter. When you generate something that reads as a photograph of a real place or a real event, say so in the file name. Yara suffixes every generated file with -gen so that nobody six months later mistakes it for documentation.