Beginner

Prompt Craft

Master the art of writing effective prompts for Stable Diffusion. Learn positive and negative prompts, weight syntax, style keywords, and proven formulas.

The Prompt Formula

A well-structured Stable Diffusion prompt follows a formula. Unlike ChatGPT, SD prompts are typically comma-separated keywords rather than full sentences:

Prompt Formula 
Subject + Medium + Style + Lighting + Quality

Example:
a majestic lion standing on a cliff at sunset,
digital painting, fantasy art style, dramatic lighting,
golden hour, highly detailed, 8k, sharp focus,
trending on artstation

Positive Prompts

Positive prompts describe what you want to see. Be specific and descriptive:

Positive Prompt Examples 
Photorealistic:
professional photo of a young woman in a cafe,
natural lighting, shallow depth of field, bokeh,
shot on Canon EOS R5, 85mm lens, f/1.4

Fantasy Art:
ancient dragon perched on a crystal tower,
fantasy landscape, epic scene, volumetric lighting,
concept art, digital painting by Greg Rutkowski

Anime:
anime girl with blue hair and golden eyes,
cherry blossom background, studio ghibli style,
soft lighting, pastel colors, detailed face

Negative Prompts

Negative prompts tell the model what to avoid. They are essential for quality:

Common Negative Prompts 
Universal negative prompt:
ugly, blurry, low quality, distorted, deformed,
disfigured, bad anatomy, wrong proportions,
extra limbs, extra fingers, mutated hands,
poorly drawn face, watermark, text, signature

For photorealism add:
cartoon, illustration, painting, drawing, anime,
3d render, CGI

For illustrations add:
photo, photograph, realistic, 3d, render

Prompt Weights

Control the emphasis on specific parts of your prompt using weight syntax:

Weight Syntax (Automatic1111) 
# Parentheses increase weight (1.1x per level)
(important keyword)          # 1.1x weight
((very important))           # 1.21x weight
(((extremely important)))    # 1.33x weight

# Square brackets decrease weight
[less important]             # 0.9x weight

# Explicit weight with colon
(golden hair:1.5)            # 1.5x weight
(background:0.5)             # 0.5x weight

# Example with weights
a beautiful landscape, (mountains:1.3), river,
(sunset:1.5), trees, (dramatic clouds:1.2)

Style Keywords

Adding style keywords dramatically changes the output:

  • Photography: professional photo, DSLR, 85mm lens, bokeh, film grain, Kodak Portra 400
  • Digital Art: digital painting, concept art, matte painting, trending on artstation
  • Traditional: oil painting, watercolor, pencil sketch, charcoal drawing, ink illustration
  • 3D: 3D render, octane render, unreal engine, Cinema 4D, isometric
  • Anime: anime style, manga, studio ghibli, makoto shinkai, cel shading

Composition Tips

  • Specify camera angle: bird's eye view, worm's eye view, close-up, wide shot
  • Describe lighting: golden hour, blue hour, rim lighting, studio lighting, neon
  • Set the mood: moody, cheerful, dark, ethereal, cinematic, dramatic
  • Add quality boosters: masterpiece, best quality, highly detailed, sharp focus
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Pro tip: Put the most important elements at the beginning of your prompt. Stable Diffusion gives more weight to tokens that appear earlier. Also, longer prompts are not always better — overly complex prompts can confuse the model.

What's Next?

Prompts are just the beginning. The next lesson covers ControlNet — which gives you precise control over composition, pose, and structure in your generated images.

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