Creating Incredible Text-to-Image Prompts with Depyct

Depyct is a brand-focused text-to-image service that transforms a simple sentence into beautiful images and brand assets. However, if you've ever tried a text-to-image service before, you'll have ran straight into the mix to find...well, mixed results. After excitedly entering what you think will trigger a beautiful reconstruction of your grandest imagination, you're met with - shall we say - mixed results on the first attempt.

The secrets behind a text to image Prompt

The bread and butter of a great Depyct output is a great prompt. A well-worded prompt is the difference between turning your imagination into a great image that could be used in your business and branding, and receiving either a suboptimal image (best case scenario) or some high octane, horrific nightmare-fuel to haunt you for weeks to come (definite worst case scenario).

Since text-to-image software became popularised towards the end of August 2022, the question has emerged: how do you create a great prompt that generates consistently great results?

Be As Specific as You Can

The Diffusion model behind Depyct thrives on highly specific prompts, especially when compared to models such as DALLE and Midjourney. You need to tell it exactly what you want.

This applies to anything you want the Depyct model to produce, including stock photos, icons and illustrations. Be descriptive as you try different combinations of keywords, referring back to the template examples provided if you get stumped in experimentation. Some of our examples, contain 40+ keywords to get the precise outcome we were looking for - with this technology, it pays to be patient to receive the best rewards!

Name Specific Art Styles or Mediums

The need for specificity doesn’t end when you fully describe the content of the image you want. You can (and should) also specify the style you want. Let’s say we want some cute pandas (because why not), but we also want them to look like they’re a watercolour painting. The first thing you should try is adding “watercolour painting” as the next keyword in your prompt, so it would read: “Cute Panda, watercolour painting.”

It is generally best to start with the fewest keywords to get close to what you want and then add more to home in on an aesthetic you’re looking for.

The Depyct model recognizes dozens of different styles, everything from pencil drawings to clay models to 3d rendering from Unreal Engine. You can use dozens of keywords to fine-tune your results.

Name Specific Artists to Guide Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is capable of doing more than emulating specific styles or mediums; it can even mimic specific artists if you want to do that. A common usage is using Alphonse Mucha for some of the more fantasy-themed outputs - Mr. Mucha's style dovetails very nicely with these kinds of pieces.

To take your prompts to the next level, absolutely add 'by Artist' (substituting the word 'Artist' with your desired artist of course!) We've added a number of artists in the prompt playbook to give you some inspiration. Also, don’t be afraid to combine artists that wouldn’t normally go together, either. Different artists' styles have a habit of being combined in weird and wonderful ways, so it's definitely worth an experiment or two!

Weight Your Keywords

Of course, just subbing keywords into your prompt will only get you so far. Sometimes, you want to emphasis certain prompts, or create negative prompts (keywords to avoid).

To emphasize keywords, just add a full colon followed by a decimal number to the word you want to emphasize. The decimal numbers are percentages, so they must add up to 1. Looking in the other direction, use parentheses (either '(' or '[' ) to decrease the weighting of the keywords that you're still looking to include, but make less of a central piece.

Going back to our “Cute grey cat” prompt, let’s imagine that it was producing cute cats correctly, but not very many of the output images featured grey cats. You could modify the prompt to read: “cute, grey cat:0.7” instead, and it would pay the most attention to grey cat, then automatically apply the difference to “cute.” You can also assign weights to each word in the prompt manually if you want finer control, like “Cute:0.10, Grey Cat:0.60, Unreal Engine rendering:0.30” for example.

Note: You can use multiple parentheses to stack up the emphasis as much as you want.

Find Inspiration Elsewhere

Stable Diffusion and other AI art generators have experienced an explosive popularity spike. You can find this sort of AI art all over the place. That means there are now at least a few million user-generated images floating around on the internet, and most of the time, people include the prompt they used to get their results.

Here are a few resources to help spark your inspiration if you aren’t sure what you’re looking to create:

Warning: All of these are potentially NSFW.

• Lexica — a repository of images generated using Stable Diffusion and the corresponding prompt. Searchable by keyword.
• Stable Diffusion Artist Style Studies — A non-exhaustive list of artists Stable Diffusion might recognize, as well as general descriptions of their artistic style. There is a ranking system to describe how well Stable Diffusion responds to the artist’s name as a part of a prompt.
• Stable Diffusion Modifier Studies — a list of modifiers that can be used with Stable Diffusion, just like the artist page.
• The AI Art Modifiers List — A photo gallery showcasing some of the strongest modifiers you can use in your prompts, and what they do. They’re sorted by modifier type.
• Top 500 Artists Represented in Stable Diffusion — We know exactly what images were included in the Stable Diffusion training set, so it is possible to tell which artists contributed the most to training the AI. Generally speaking, the more strongly represented an artist was in the training data, the better Stable Diffusion will respond to their name as a keyword.
• The Stable Diffusion Subreddit — The Stable Diffusion subreddit has a constant flow of new prompts and fun discoveries. If you’re looking for inspiration or insight, you can’t go wrong.

Tweak Other Important Settings

A good prompt is the hardest part of using Stable Diffusion, but there are a few other settings that will dramatically change the results.

• Height and Width: Very self-explanatory - simply change the height or width to get a larger image. Note: a larger image is more likely to contain a higher level detail, and is recommended once you've honed in on the prompt that you like!
• Image Quality: This equates to sampling steps in the Stable Diffusion world. The default starts you off at 50 steps. Increment 50 additional steps for each higher setting you use (High gives you 100; Very High gives you the maximum of 150 steps). Generally speaking, the more steps you take, the better the outcome!

Some of Our Favorite Stylized-Prompts

These are some of our favorite prompts since they tend to work so reliably. Just drop in a subject of your choosing plus a few modifiers. All other Depyct settings were kept the same as the prompts up above.

Note: As a rule, the model behind Depyct creates sunsets and fall leaves exceptionally well.

(Subject), 35mm, sharp

Pick a subject, and this prompt reliably returns photorealistic results of people, animals, and landscapes.

Note: This example prompt also included “Golden Hour” to get the sunset colors.

Prompt: photograph of mount katahdin with a beautiful lake, 35mm, sharp, golden hour

(Subject), low poly 3d render, vibrant pastel colors, tilt shift, film grain

Enter a subject and you’ll get it in the “Art of Rally” aesthetic.

(Subject), (Environmental Description), cinematic, dramatic, composition, sunny sky, brutalist, hyper realistic, epic scale, sense of awe, hypermaximalist, insane level of details, artstation HQ

Just drop in a subject and an environmental description, and this prompt provides great city concept art images with an environmental effect of your choosing. Here is an example using New York City as the subject and dust storm as the environmental description:

prompt: new york city, dust storm, cinematic, dramatic, composition, sunny sky, brutalist, hyper realistic, epic scale, sense of awe, hypermaximalist, insane level of details, artstation HQ