Iterating: From First Try to Final
The single biggest difference between people who get great results and people who don't is not prompt quality. It is that one group changes one thing at a time, and the other group rewrites the whole prompt after every disappointing result and learns nothing.
A working loop:
- Start short. Subject, setting, medium. Four or five generations. You are looking for a direction, not a final image.
- Pick the closest one and lock its seed. Now you have a stable base and every change you make is legible.
- Change one thing. The light. Then the framing. Then the palette. Note what each word actually did — this is how you build real intuition rather than folklore.
- Switch from generating to editing. Once composition is right, stop rerolling. Inpaint the problem areas, extend the canvas, adjust by conversation. Rerolling a good image to fix a small flaw usually loses more than it gains.
- Finish outside the tool. Upscale, then colour-grade, crop and retouch in whatever you normally use. Almost no professional output ships straight from the generator.
Habits worth having:
- Keep a prompt journal. Prompt, seed, tool, settings, and one line on what worked. This is also your evidence of authorship if you ever need to prove it — see the section on copyright.
- A/B a single variable. Two generations differing by one phrase teach you more than twenty random ones.
- Reroll before you rewrite. If a prompt gives one good result in five, the prompt is fine and you were unlucky. Judge a prompt on four generations, not one.
- Know when to stop prompting. Some things are faster to fix in Photoshop in thirty seconds than to coax out of a model in thirty minutes. Prompting is a tool in your workflow, not the whole of it.