Prompt Cheat Sheet

Crops in until texture and expression are the whole picture — pores, fabric weave, condensation on a glass.

Reach for it when detail or emotion is the point. Add “extreme” if you want to get closer than a person normally stands.

Pulls back to include the surroundings, with slight edge stretching that makes a space feel larger than it is.

Reach for it when the viewer needs to know where they are. Landscapes, interiors, establishing shots.

Extreme curvature — straight lines bow outward and the center bulges toward you.

Reach for it when you want skate-video energy or deliberate disorientation. It is never subtle.

Puts the viewer beneath the subject so it looms overhead. Reads instantly as power and scale.

Reach for it when something should feel monumental or threatening. Say “worm’s-eye view, camera on the ground” for the extreme version.

Places the viewer above the subject, which shrinks it and makes it feel observed.

Reach for it when you want vulnerability, or need to show a scene’s layout without going fully overhead.

Straight down. Flattens the scene into a graphic arrangement of shapes rather than a space.

Reach for it when shooting flat-lays, table settings, maps of a room, or any pattern. Say “overhead flat lay” for product work.

High altitude at a slight tilt, so landscape reads as terrain instead of as a view.

Reach for it when the scale of a place is the subject: coastlines, city grids, crowds.

Camera perpendicular to the subject, so outline and silhouette dominate over depth.

Reach for it when the shape is what matters — profile portraits, or a product where thickness needs to read.

Puts the viewer inside the scene, usually with hands or held objects at the frame edge.

Reach for it when you want the viewer to be the person rather than watch them.

A shoulder in soft foreground frames whatever the person is looking at, creating depth in two planes.

Reach for it when showing someone looking at something — a screen, a view, another person.

Subject razor sharp, background dissolved into soft blobs of light.

Reach for it when shooting almost any portrait or product. This is the single fastest way to make an image look professionally shot.

Cinema aspect ratio with oval bokeh and streaking flares across the frame.

Reach for it when the image should read as a film still rather than a photograph.

Adds fine noise, which undoes the plastic smoothness that gives generated images away.

Reach for it when anything looks too clean. Costs nothing and helps almost every photographic prompt.

Streaks the moving parts while the rest stays put. Reads as speed.

Reach for it when movement matters more than clarity — traffic, dancers, a thrown ball.

Moving lights smear into ribbons; water and clouds go silky and smooth.

Reach for it when shooting night cities, waterfalls, or star trails. Different from motion blur: the lights move, not the subject.

Everything razor sharp at peak movement — splashes suspended, dust hanging in the air.

Reach for it when the moment matters more than the movement. The direct opposite of motion blur.

Warm orange light raking across the scene from a low angle.

Reach for it when you do not yet know what light to ask for. It flatters nearly every subject and is very hard to make ugly.

Even blue ambient light, with artificial lights just beginning to register.

Reach for it when shooting cities and architecture. It is the narrow window where sky and windows balance each other.

The sun itself in frame with color spread across the sky. Sunrise runs cooler and cleaner, sunset warmer and hazier.

Reach for it when you want the sun visible. If you only want the light, ask for golden hour instead — it is the better term.

Low, cold, directional light with deep shadows and little color.

Reach for it when shooting night exteriors that still need to be readable.

Shadows with gentle edges and nothing blown out.

Reach for it when shooting faces or food, or anything where a hard shadow would be unflattering.

One hard source with most of the frame falling away into black.

Reach for it when you want tension and weight. The opposite decision from soft light — you cannot have both.

Light from behind draws a glowing edge that separates the subject from the background.

Reach for it when a subject needs to pop off a dark background. Works beautifully combined with fog or haze.

Beams of light you can actually see, because there is dust or moisture for them to catch on.

Reach for it when shooting forests, cathedrals, warehouses. Needs something in the air, so pair it with haze.

Colored light sources sitting inside the scene, reflecting off wet and glossy surfaces.

Reach for it when doing night city work. Name the two colors you want, or you will get all of them at once.

Fully controlled light against a plain background. No environment, all subject.

Reach for it when shooting products or clean portraits where the setting would only distract.

A broad request: motivated light sources, wider framing, film-like color.

Reach for it when you are still exploring. Useful as a starting point, but replace it with a specific lighting term once you know what you actually want.

Softens everything with distance, so depth reads as a stack of separated layers.

Reach for it when you want mood and clean separation between foreground and background. Say “light mist” if fog is too heavy.

Falling water plus the wet surfaces it leaves behind — the reflections do most of the work.

Reach for it when you want mood and an excuse for reflected light. Add “at night” for the classic look.

Dramatic cloud structure with flat, low-contrast light beneath it.

Reach for it when a landscape needs threat and scale.

Simplifies a scene into white shapes and bounces light upward into the shadows.

Reach for it when you want quiet, cold, or a clear seasonal read.

Gives the air physical substance, so light beams and depth become visible.

Reach for it when almost any lit scene. This is the quiet trick behind most images that look expensively shot.

A warm, flickering light source living inside the frame.

Reach for it when a night scene needs a warm anchor to balance all the cold light.

Blue-shifted light falling in shafts, with visible particulate suspended in the water.

Reach for it when shooting anything submerged. The particles are what sell it as water rather than blue air.

Black field with hard unfiltered light and no atmospheric falloff.

Reach for it when you want scale and isolation. Note that shadows in space are much harder than people expect.

Vast, minimal, high contrast, with strong directional shadows across the sand.

Reach for it when you want emptiness, heat, or a clean horizon line.

Vertical structure with dappled light filtering down through a canopy.

Reach for it when you want enclosure and texture. Pairs unusually well with god rays and mist.

Layered ridgelines receding into atmospheric haze.

Reach for it when scale is the subject. The haze between layers is what creates the sense of distance.

Open horizon, reflected sky, and motion at the waterline.

Reach for it when you want openness or a natural place to put motion in an otherwise still frame.

Built environment at scale — geometry, glass, and repeated verticals.

Reach for it when you need an urban setting. Say “city street at night” instead to get down to eye level, where neon and reflections live.

Pulls saturation and brightness down across the whole frame.

Reach for it when you want restraint and weight. Works as a modifier on top of most other genres.

Dense neon, permanent rain, towering signage, deep shadow.

Reach for it when you want the specific near-future-dystopia look. It is a strong flavor and overrides most style terms.

Clean surfaces, restrained palette, engineered geometry.

Reach for it when you want the future without the grime. The opposite end from cyberpunk.

Structures being reclaimed by weather and plants; dust and rust throughout.

Reach for it when you want the aftermath rather than the event.

Impossible architecture, luminous elements, heightened natural forms.

Reach for it when realism is not the goal and you want scale and wonder.

Rough materials, firelight, hand-built construction.

Reach for it when you want a grounded historical setting. Add “period-accurate” or you will drift toward fantasy.

Specific architecture, wardrobe, and a restrained, deliberate compositional style.

Reach for it when you want that setting specifically. Unusually reliable for such a narrow term.

Black and white or near it, hard slashes of light, rain, cigarette haze.

Reach for it when you want mystery and moral weight. Say “detective” with it to bring in the wardrobe and props.

Low angles, dynamic poses, dramatic backlighting, extreme scale.

Reach for it when you want comic-adjacent spectacle in a photographic frame.

Recognizable elements arranged in ways that do not quite resolve.

Reach for it when you want unease rather than fantasy. The “slightly” matters — drop it and you get chaos.

Strips the frame to one subject and a great deal of empty room around it.

Reach for it when you need space for text, or the subject is strong enough to carry the frame alone.

Restrained palette, expensive surfaces, careful light. Quiet rather than flashy.

Reach for it when you want premium without gold and sparkle. Say “old money” to push it further toward heritage.

Period color response with lifted blacks and a warm cast.

Reach for it when you want nostalgia. Always name the decade — “vintage” alone lands somewhere vague.

Styled, deliberate, and confident. Composed for a page rather than a moment.

Reach for it when you want polish and intent. Adds wardrobe and posing direction, not just a look.

Looks caught rather than staged, shot at eye level in real surroundings.

Reach for it when you want authenticity. The direct opposite of the editorial treatment.

Film color response and organic grain instead of digital cleanliness.

Reach for it when you want a photograph that feels made rather than rendered. The most broadly useful term in this group.

Square frame, thick white border, low contrast, slightly shifted color.

Reach for it when you want the object as much as the image — something that looks physically held.

Blown-out foreground, black background, unflattering and immediate.

Reach for it when you want a party or documentary feel. The ugliness is the entire point.

Subject positioned low and centered with deliberate empty room at the top.

Reach for it when you actually intend to put type on it. Asking for the layout gets you the space for it.

Flat color areas with hard shadow boundaries and clean linework.

Reach for it when you want the Japanese animation look. “Cel shaded” is what keeps it from drifting into generic digital art.

Heavy black outlines, limited palette, printed dot texture.

Reach for it when you want Western comics. The halftone is what makes it read as printed rather than drawn.

Thick, directional paint with texture standing off the surface.

Reach for it when you want gravity and craft. “Impasto” is what gets you actual paint thickness.

Transparent washes bleeding into each other with the paper showing through.

Reach for it when you want lightness and suggestion. The paper texture is what stops it looking like a filter.

Graphite linework with the underdrawing left in.

Reach for it when you want something that reads as in-progress rather than finished.

Handmade forms with tool marks and slightly imperfect surfaces.

Reach for it when you want tactile charm. The fingerprints are what separate it from a smooth 3D render.

Clean CG surfaces with physically accurate bounced light.

Reach for it when you want product-visualization polish.

No perspective convergence — parallel lines stay parallel at a fixed angle.

Reach for it when diagramming a space, or making game-style art where every part reads equally.

Extreme selective focus that tricks the eye into reading a real scene as a model.

Reach for it when you want a city or crowd to look like a toy. Works best shot from above.

Stacked flat shapes with visible edges and soft shadows between layers.

Reach for it when you want depth built from flat elements — good for title cards and covers.

Light bending through the material and pooling into bright patterns behind it.

Reach for it when the material is the subject. “Caustics” is the term that produces the light pooling.

Fully reflective surface that renders its entire surroundings.

Reach for it when you want a hard, expensive, slightly unreal object. It reflects the scene, so the scene has to be worth reflecting.

Color that changes across the surface depending on viewing angle.

Reach for it when you want a synthetic, contemporary, slightly toylike finish.

Two subjects overlaid so each shows through the other.

Reach for it when you want to state a relationship between two things without a caption.

Subject reduced to a black shape with all detail gone.

Reach for it when the outline alone tells the story. Requires a genuinely recognizable shape.

The scene doubled in water, glass, or a mirror.

Reach for it when you want symmetry or a visual rhyme. Still water is the easiest surface to ask for.

Displaced color channels and torn scan lines.

Reach for it when you want digital decay. The channel split is what makes it read as glitch rather than damage.

Pushes fine detail and edge definition throughout the frame.

Reach for it when the result comes back soft or vague. Covers what “4K” and “8K” were reaching for, more reliably.

Pushes toward camera output rather than illustration.

Reach for it when the result drifts toward digital painting when you wanted a photograph. Say “hyperrealistic” to push past what a camera would actually capture.