AI Image Prompt Cheat Sheet
$5Burning through credits on prompts that don’t land is one of the most common (and avoidable) frustrations with AI image tools.
You’re not specifying lighting or camera
“A photo of a coffee shop” is ambiguous. “A photo of a coffee shop, natural window light, shot on 35mm, shallow depth of field” gives the model something concrete to aim for.
You’re not using negative prompts
If you keep getting extra fingers, warped text, or cluttered backgrounds, a negative prompt (telling the model what to avoid) fixes more of this than re-rolling ever will.
You’re mixing styles that fight each other
“Photorealistic anime portrait” asks for two contradictory things at once. Pick one dominant style and let secondary descriptors support it, not compete with it.
For a shortcut past the trial-and-error phase, the AI Image Prompt Cheat Sheet has 120 tested prompts across Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion, plus the negative-prompt list that fixes most of the above on its own.