When you try to create images with artificial intelligence, you will need to instruct the AI generator what you want in your image. The message that you send to the generator is called a prompt. I will show you how you can work on your prompts to get the result that you wish. For the creation of the images below, I used the free AI Generator https://playgroundai.com/.
What is the subject of your picture?
What do you want the generator to create? Is it a landscape, a person, an animal, a car? This is the first thing that you have to define. Then you need to set a context. What is the subject doing in the image?
For our example, I want to create an image of a girl that paints a picture. I entered the following prompt:
young girl painting a picture
Each time, I ask the generator to create 4 images so that we can see the range of the results results. This is the result of this prompt:
Give qualities to your subject
I want the image to be a bit more precise and I adapt my prompt as follows:
young girl with black hair painting a picture
You see now that all 4 images show a girl with black hair but now I have different styles and I'm not totally happy with what I see. The girl is not looking the way I want, let's change that...
I use now the following prompt:
young smiling girl with black unruly hair painting a picture in a garden
A smile can change so much. The result is already much more pleasant in my opinion, we have given a facial expression, some movements to the hair and a garden background. With some adjectives, we can give a totally new tone to the image.
Select a style
I would like the image to have a different style. I can now put a coma after my subject and define the style of my picture. I will chose watercolor. This is the new prompt:
young smiling girl with black unruly hair painting a picture in a garden, watercolor
The style is nice but I'm not so happy about it. Let's try another style. I want to use the style anime. I will simply replace watercolor by anime. It's as easy as that to change the style and you can really play around with that. There are some style guides that you can find online. The new prompt:
young smiling girl with black unruly hair painting a picture in a garden, anime
Adding details
Maybe it would be nice if the girl was dressed differently. Let's try to get her dressed in a blue sweater and just for the sake of the exercise, let her wear some black gloves. I will use the following prompt for that:
young smiling girl with black unruly hair painting a picture in a garden, anime, blue sweater, black gloves
We have started with a subject and a setting, then we got more precise and added some defining adjectives. We then chose a style for the image and finished with some clothing details. This is a step by step way to create our prompt, to get closer and closer to the result that we want.
There are definitely other ways to get there but I like this step by step approach because I understand what the algorithm is doing. Also it's important not to overcharge your prompt or write contradictory sentences. The longer the prompt, the more the generator will skip some part.
I hope you found this helpful and encourage you to try to play with these prompts to learn how to use these AI generator tools.
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