"Photorealistic, premium, 8K" is not a sufficient brief. It does not say who is being photographed, where the light comes from or what the viewer should notice first. A useful result needs a specific scene and specific checks.
This guide uses three different photographic tasks: a human portrait, a café interior and a food still life. Each tests different things. The portrait needs credible skin and anatomy, the room needs perspective and lighting, and the food needs convincing materials and composition. All three examples were generated with AI; they are not client projects or a model comparison.
Decide what the photograph needs to do
| Scene | Purpose | What matters |
|---|---|---|
| Street portrait | Introduce a person without a formal studio pose | Expression, skin, lighting and background separation |
| Small café | Explain space, scale and atmosphere | Perspective, table count and daylight |
| Food on a worktop | Attract attention while leaving headline space | Texture, arrangement and a quiet area |
Before adding stylistic adjectives, describe the subject, setting, composition and light. Then specify what does not belong. Unnecessary props create more opportunities for visual errors.
The prompts below are reader-friendly briefs for the illustrated scenes, not verbatim technical generation records. Another attempt may produce a different photograph.
Portrait: natural skin rather than a plastic face
The opening portrait uses an ordinary European street and soft overcast light. A navy coat keeps the colour palette simple. The background provides context while the face remains the subject.
Create a horizontal photographic portrait of a fictional woman around 38 years old wearing a navy coat on an ordinary European street. Relaxed expression, natural skin texture, fine lines and individual strands of hair. Soft side daylight under an overcast sky, a quiet blurred background. Head and upper body, 3:2 aspect ratio. No beauty retouching, waxy skin, artificial glow, lettering or logos.
What to inspect in this kind of photograph:
- Enlarge the eyes, eyelids, ears and hairline. A natural face need not be perfectly symmetrical.
- Check skin texture around the eyes too. A smooth surface with a few random pores does not necessarily look natural.
- Compare the nose shadow, light on the face and eye reflections.
- Inspect the neck, collar and coat edges. This crop has no hands, so it cannot demonstrate correct hand anatomy.
For a real person's portrait, start with a photograph of that person. Do not use a fictional character as a photograph of a team member or satisfied customer.
Interior: the room needs to make physical sense
A pleasant palette is not enough for a café. Viewers form an impression of its size and arrangement, so windows, chairs, tables and the floor need to work together.
Horizontal daylight photograph of a small fictional café. Large windows on the left, three separate tables with chairs, simple natural materials and restrained decoration. Camera approximately at eye level, believable perspective and straight verticals. Soft window light and natural shadows under the furniture. 3:2 aspect ratio, no people, readable lettering, logos or exaggerated wide-angle distortion.
Start with geometry. Count the tables and trace their legs. Check whether chairs merge with tables and whether floor lines imply conflicting perspectives. Then compare lighting direction with the shadows beneath furniture. Natural light does not need to illuminate every corner equally.
This example explains an interior brief. It does not replace a photograph of a real venue and should not be presented as one on a business profile or booking page.
Food: texture and space for a headline
The third scene has a different compositional job. The food sits on the right, leaving the left side of the stainless-steel worktop clear. A headline can occupy its own space without covering the subject.
Horizontal editorial food photograph on a stainless-steel worktop. On the right, a ceramic plate with a pear, blood orange and bread. Natural skin, flesh and crust textures, believable contact between food and plate. Soft window light. Keep the left half quiet and empty for a headline added later. 3:2 aspect ratio. No text, branding, decorative flowers, plastic shine or extra props.
Inspect the pear's surface, the cut fruit and the bread's pores. Pay attention to contact with the plate: objects can appear to dissolve or float at these boundaries. Metal reflections should not overpower the food. Finally, try the actual headline in the empty area and inspect the mobile crop.
Keep important website text in HTML so it remains editable, legible and accessible across screen sizes. For a social-media image, add typography in a design editor after selecting the photograph.
Name the defect and what must stay unchanged
Replace "make it more realistic" with an observable change:
| Scene | Example revision instruction |
|---|---|
| Portrait | Preserve the face, expression and lighting. Reduce skin retouching and restore natural texture. |
| Café | Preserve the camera and arrangement of three tables. Fix the chair leg that merges with the floor. |
| Food | Preserve the plate and food on the right. Remove small distracting objects from the left-hand area. |
These are example instructions for defects you might find, not a record of edits performed on these pictures. After each edit, compare the areas that should not have changed too. A reference image alone does not guarantee their preservation.
Before publication, inspect full resolution and the mobile version. Check the subject, anatomy or construction, lighting, any lettering and the picture's fit with the actual page. For tool selection, see the AI image-generator comparison; for motion, continue with AI video. Prompts like these can become a shared company prompt library for the whole team. In AI training for companies I build it with you on your own scenes and products.