Making great AI art is largely dependent on the input you give to the model, and this is all about prompts. So what are Stable Diffusion prompts and how can you craft them to get the very best results?

Introduction to Stable Diffusion prompts

Prompts in Stable Diffusion simply refers to the text that you enter to generate new images. Essentially, this is what you are telling the AI you want to generate.

Whilst you can use very basic prompts, the more information you can give the model to work with, the better, as this will likely give you more accurate results.

Raw prompts

A raw prompt is the basic description for making AI art. Think of these as the basic ingredients you need to start generating images. When most people start using Stable Diffusion, they tend to begin by using only simple raw prompts, for example:

• Mongoose
• Alien planet
• Wizard

Ok, so far so good. But these aren’t particularly Earth-shattering images.

So let’s think about how we can improve our images by writing a more in-depth prompt.

Style

Stable Diffusion is only as powerful as the information you put into it, and for best results, you really want to give the AI a style to work with.

For example, you might be wanting an image which looks like an oil-on-canvas painting, or a sketch made using a pencil, or maybe you want it to be just really realistic.

This is where styles come in.

Try now entering a raw prompt (like the ones we gave above), then adding a style after it, separated by a comma like this:

<PROMPT> , <STYLE>

For example, our prompts now might be written as so:

• mongoose, oil painting
• alien planet, realistic
• wizard, pencil drawing

Here are the results when we add a bit of style. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Realism

Ok, so we’ve made some pretty cool art here, but what about if you want your images to look realistic? Well, sometimes you may need to add the word “realistic” or even the superlative “hyper realistic” to your prompts.

Name an Artist

Stable Diffusion has also been trained on a large database of famous artists, and it’s really useful to nail down the specific genre and artist by entering them as a prompt.

For example, we might decide to have our wizard above in the style of one of the old masters, like Da Vinci or Rembrandt. If so, just enter their name after the raw text and a comma. And remember you can combine with other prompts too, for example:

<RAW PROMPT>, <STYLE>, <ARTIST> or even <RAW PROMPT>, <STYLE> by <ARTIST>.

So our prompts might now look like this:

• mongoose, oil painting by picasso
• alien planet, modern art by andy warhol
• wizard, pencil drawing by michelangelo

You can see the difference already. We are getting closer and closer to what we might want.

Ok, just for fun, let’s try again using an even more modern styles. Let’s make a hyper realistic image of a wizard casting a spell in the style of Grand Theft Auto!!!

• wizard casting spell, grand theft auto style, hyper realistic

Now, that’s what I’m talking about. Ok, it’s not the best image, and it could do with some improvement, but essentially you get the idea. The more information you can give to Stable Diffusion, the more it has to work with, and as a result you’re way more likely to get some great images with well written prompts.

No limit to prompts

There are no limit to the number of Stable Diffusion prompts you can use, and really it’s more about entering prompts that will get you closer to what you want rather than just stuffing more and more words in for the sake of it.

Reusing Prompts

Want to get some great ideas on prompts? Head over to Lexica, which is a search engine for Stable Diffusion art (yes really!!!). Check out some art which you like, and see the prompts which the creator used to make their image, and feel free to use them too (remember, they’re just words, nobody owns them, so you can use at your leisure).

Here’s a few epic prompts you might use to improve your overall image quality, so do have a play about and see what happens. And if you want more, well, check out our Prompts page for some stunning ideas:

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