Write better
prompts.

Fundamentals · 4 min read

Anatomy of a prompt

A prompt is not a wish. It is a specification, and the model fills every gap you leave. Name four things and most of the guesswork disappears: the subject and what it is made of, the light, the framing, and the style.

Material carries more information than adjectives. “Beautiful watch” tells the model almost nothing, because beauty is not a visual property it can render. “Brushed titanium” tells it about reflectance, grain and colour temperature all at once.

Fundamentals · 3 min read

Light does the work

If you change one word in a prompt and want the biggest shift for the least effort, change the light. It decides mood, contrast, colour and where the eye lands, all before the subject matters.

• Soft key — even, forgiving, commercial. Good for product listings.
• Hard rim — a bright edge separating subject from background. Dramatic, premium.
• Golden hour — warm, low, long shadows. Reads as expensive and cinematic.
• Overcast — flat and neutral. Useful when the subject must be read accurately.

Workflow · 3 min read

Iterating without starting over

The most common mistake is rewriting the whole prompt when one element is wrong. You lose everything that was already working and start from a different random seed.

Instead: keep the seed, change one clause, run again. That gives you a variation on the same picture rather than a different picture. Change the light clause and the composition survives. Change the framing and the material survives.

Only start fresh when the concept is wrong, not when the execution is.

Use case · 5 min read

Product photography without a shoot

Catalogue images have a grammar. Follow it and generated stills sit alongside photographed ones without looking out of place.

• Say the surface. Seamless grey, marble, brushed steel, linen. The surface sets the reflection.
• Say the angle. Three-quarter is the retail default. Top-down for flat lays. Macro for texture.
• Keep lighting consistent across a range, or your listings will look assembled from different sources.
• Leave copy space if the image will carry text: “copy space left” genuinely works.

Video · 4 min read

Writing for motion

Video prompts fail differently to image prompts. The model has to invent every frame after the first while keeping the subject the same object throughout, so ambiguity compounds.

Name the camera move rather than describing action. “Push in”, “slow drift”, “parallax” and “orbit” are instructions the model can execute. “Exciting” is not.

Short clips hold together better than long ones. If you need more, generate several and cut them, rather than asking for one long take.

Fundamentals · 3 min read

Five common mistakes

1. Stacking adjectives. “Stunning, beautiful, amazing” adds nothing. One concrete noun beats three superlatives.
2. Contradicting yourself. “Minimal, highly detailed” asks for two opposite things and you get whichever wins.
3. Forgetting the frame. No framing means the model picks, and it rarely picks yours.
4. Rewriting instead of adjusting. Covered above — change one clause.
5. Judging one render. Output is probabilistic. Look at a set before deciding the prompt is wrong.