Making AI Images Look Real: Common Tells and Fixes

Most people can spot a generated image within a second, and usually without noticing anything specifically wrong. That instinct is picking up on a handful of concrete, fixable things.

1. There Is No Noise

Every real photograph has grain, from the sensor or the film. Generated images have almost none, and the total absence of it is unnatural in a way people notice without being able to name.

This is the highest impact fix on the list and takes about thirty seconds.

1. Add a new transparent layer above everything.
2. Filters, Noise, RGB Noise. Set the amount low, around 0.05 on each channel.
3. Set the layer mode to Overlay.
4. Drop the opacity to about 15 percent.
5. Zoom to 100 percent and raise it until you can just see it, then back off slightly.

2. The Lighting Is Too Even

Generated images tend to be lit as if by a giant softbox from every direction at once. Nothing falls into real shadow, nothing blows out, and there is no clear direction to the light.

Fix it by putting the light somewhere.

1. Add a new layer filled with 50 percent grey, set to Overlay. Grey is invisible in Overlay, so nothing changes yet.
2. Take a large soft brush at about 10 percent opacity.
3. Paint black on the side away from your light source. It darkens gradually.
4. Paint white on the lit side and on the edges facing the light.
5. Build it up in several passes. One heavy stroke looks obvious.

This is the same dodge and burn technique used on real portraits, and the portrait retouching guide covers it in more depth. The blend mode visualizer shows why grey vanishes on an Overlay layer.

3. Everything Is in Focus

A real lens has one focal plane. Things nearer and further than it are soft, and how soft depends on the aperture. Generated images frequently have the foreground, subject and distant background all equally sharp, which no camera can do.

1. Duplicate the layer.
2. On the top copy, apply Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur with a radius of 8 to 20 depending on image size.
3. Add a layer mask to the blurred copy, filled with black so the blur is entirely hidden.
4. Paint white on the mask over the background, to reveal the blur there.
5. Leave the subject and its immediate surroundings untouched.
6. Feather the transition. A hard edge between sharp and blurred looks worse than no blur at all.

4. The Colours Are Too Vivid and Too Consistent

Generated images usually run slightly hot on saturation, and every part of the image shares the same colour temperature. Real photographs have mixed lighting, colour casts and areas where the colour has fallen away.

1. Colors, Hue-Saturation. Drop saturation by 5 to 10. Almost always an improvement.
2. Colors, Curves. Pull a gentle S curve for contrast.
3. On the Curves blue channel, raise the shadow end very slightly and lower the highlight end very slightly. That single move is the standard cool shadows and warm highlights split.
4. Colors, Color Balance. Nudge midtones a touch off neutral. Perfectly neutral colour is itself a tell.

The colour correction guide covers Curves properly. To copy a specific look, run a real photograph you like through the colour palette generator and match to those values with the colour converter.

5. Everything Is Too Perfect

Real surfaces are scratched, dusty, worn at the corners and slightly asymmetrical. Generated ones tend to be showroom fresh.

Skin is the most common case. Frequency separation lets you add texture back without touching the underlying tones.

6. The Composition Is Dead Centre

Generators put the subject in the middle. Photographers usually do not, and a centred subject with even margins reads as a rendering rather than a photograph.

Crop off centre. Put the subject on a thirds line, leave more space in the direction they are facing, and let something break the edge of the frame. The image cropper has a thirds grid built into the selection box.

The Order to Do Them In

Grain must be the final step. Adding it early and then colour grading over it produces uneven noise that looks worse than none at all.

The Two Minute Version

If you only have a couple of minutes, these three do about 80 percent of the work:

• Drop saturation by 8.
• Gentle S curve in Curves.
• Grain layer on Overlay at 15 percent.

Everything else on this page is refinement on top of those three.

Common Questions

What is the single fastest fix?

Grain. Add a new layer, run RGB Noise at a low amount, set the layer to Overlay at about 15 percent. Thirty seconds, and it does more than anything else on the list.

Why do generated images all look slightly the same?

A model produces the most probable version of what you asked for. Probable means average. Everything specific and slightly odd about a real photograph gets smoothed out.

Should I add lens distortion too?

A very small amount helps for anything meant to look like a photograph. Real lenses bend straight lines slightly, especially at the edges. Filters, Distorts, Lens Distortion, with a tiny value.

Does this work on AI illustrations as well?

Some of it. Grain and colour grading help. Depth of field usually does not, because an illustration has no lens to simulate.