AI Image Prompt Builder
Build a prompt one decision at a time: subject, shot, style, lighting, colour, mood. Works with any image generator, and costs nothing because it runs in your browser.
The one thing the picture is about. Be concrete. "A tabby cat" beats "an animal".
How close the camera sits, and from where. This decides the composition more than anything else.
What the image is made of. Naming a medium is safer than naming a living artist.
The single biggest lever on mood. Change only this and the same subject feels completely different.
Name two or three colours, not ten. A tight palette reads as deliberate.
Only useful when the style is photograph. A focal length changes how the face and background look.
Where it happens. Add the season or weather if it matters.
One or two words. Too many mood words fight each other and the model averages them out.
Keep this short. Long strings of quality words stopped helping years ago.
Negative prompt, for generators that support one
Your prompt
Negative prompt
Copy the prompt, then paste it into the generator page. Nothing here is sent anywhere.
Worked Examples
Six prompts that do a specific job, with the reason each one is built the way it is.
A matte black ceramic coffee mug, centred product photograph, soft window light from the left, seamless light grey background, 85mm lens, shallow depth of field, muted earth tones, sharp focus, fine detail
Why it works: The plain seamless background is the important part. It cuts out cleanly in one pass later.
A desk with an open laptop, a notebook and a plant, flat vector illustration, overhead flat lay, teal and orange, clean minimal composition, no text
Why it works: Flat vector survives being scaled down to a thumbnail. Photographs turn to mush at that size.
An elderly fisherman with a weathered face, head and shoulders portrait, photograph, soft overcast light, desaturated grey and olive, 85mm portrait lens, shallow depth of field, calm and quiet, sharp focus, fine detail
Why it works: Overcast light is forgiving. Hard light exaggerates the artefacts you will have to fix by hand.
Weathered concrete wall surface, macro detail shot, flat even lighting, monochrome black and white, heavy texture and visible brush strokes, no subject, no focal point
Why it works: Asking for no focal point is what stops the model inventing a subject in the middle.
A empty tram stop at night, wide establishing shot, photograph, neon signage glow, neon pink and cyan, 24mm wide angle, rain on the pavement, lonely, grainy and imperfect
Why it works: One light source plus one weather detail does more work than a paragraph of adjectives.
A simple mountain and river symbol, flat vector illustration, centred, thick even strokes, monochrome black and white, clean minimal composition, plain white background
Why it works: Generators cannot make production logos. They can make a shape worth redrawing properly.
Six Habits That Improve Every Prompt
- Put the subject first. Most models weight the opening words most heavily. Start with what the picture is of, then describe it.
- One idea per clause. Short descriptive clauses separated by commas read more reliably than long sentences joined with "and".
- Cut the quality spam. Strings like "8k ultra HD masterpiece trending on artstation" did very little even in 2023 and do less now.
- Say what to exclude separately. Writing "no text" inside a prompt often produces text, because the model sees the word "text". Use the negative prompt field.
- Change one thing at a time. When a result is close, edit a single clause and regenerate. Rewriting the whole prompt loses the parts that were working.
- Name a medium, not a living artist. "Oil painting with visible brush strokes" is specific, repeatable, and does not lean on someone's living body of work.
What a Negative Prompt Actually Does
A negative prompt lists what you do not want. The model steers away from those concepts while it generates, rather than removing them afterwards.
Not every generator supports one. Where it is supported it usually appears as a second text box. Where it is not, you have to work by adding positive instructions instead, for example "plain seamless background" rather than "no clutter".
Common Questions
Does this work with any generator?
Yes. The prompt is plain English, so it pastes into any of them. Some accept extra syntax such as weights or parameters, which you can add to the end yourself.
Why is my result still not what I pictured?
Usually one of three things. The prompt describes a mood rather than a scene, it contains two ideas that fight each other, or it relies on the model knowing something specific that it does not. Make the subject more concrete first.
How long should a prompt be?
One to three lines is the useful range. Past that, later words carry less and less weight and start diluting the parts that mattered.
What do I do with the image afterwards?
Generate it, then finish it properly. The generator page covers the four jobs that come up every time, from fixing hands to adding real text in GIMP.