Describing What You See
The skill underneath prompting is not writing. It is looking — being able to name what makes an image you admire work. Artists who develop this vocabulary get better results from every tool, permanently, because it is the vocabulary the models were trained on.
Light — the highest-leverage category, and the one beginners underuse most.
- Direction: backlit, side-lit, top light, underlit
- Quality: hard shadows, soft diffused light, overcast, dappled
- Time and source: golden hour, blue hour, noon sun, candlelight, sodium streetlight, screen glow
- Contrast: high-key (bright, low contrast), low-key (dark, dominated by shadow), chiaroscuro
Camera and framing — this is how you control composition.
- Shot size: extreme close-up, portrait, medium shot, wide establishing shot
- Angle: eye level, low angle, high angle, overhead, Dutch angle
- Lens behaviour: wide angle (expansive, distorted edges), long lens (compressed, shallow focus), macro, fisheye
- Depth: shallow depth of field, everything in focus, foreground framing
Colour — describe a relationship, not just a hue.
- Muted earth tones, high-saturation neon, monochrome with a single red accent
- Complementary orange and teal, analogous blues and greens, desaturated with warm highlights
Surface and material — what makes an image feel touchable.
- Weathered, polished, matte, translucent, wet, dusty, hand-worn
- For illustration: visible brushwork, heavy grain, clean vector edges, rough ink line
A practical drill. Take three images you wish you had made. For each, write six lines: subject, light, colour, framing, medium, and mood. Do that for a week and your prompting improves more than any template will manage. You are building the vocabulary; the tools already speak it.