Laying the Foundations
Prompting can seem daunting at first, but let's break it down. First, let's answer the question: What is Prompting? Prompting is a way of communicating your vision to the Kaiber AI, which will use your prompt as a guide.
Learn from Your Inspiration
Take a look at Kaiber’s Gallery for inspiration. You can even create using other users’ prompts! Another good practice is to analyze famous artwork and break it down. What is the subject? What is the lighting like? How would you describe the setting?
For example, Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” could be described as:
Relaxing Parisians, dressed in mid-19th century clothing, are depicted on a sunny day in a lush green park with several trees. A small lake is visible in the upper right corner, and white sailboats can be seen in the distance. The oil painting is done in a pointillism style by Georges Seurat.
Now you can use the description to help create your prompt!
A Helpful Structure for Prompts
A good place to start writing a well-crafted prompt is following this general 5-step structure:
01. Subject
What is the primary focus?
ie: Parisians, white sailboats, small monkey, pet dogs.
02. Prepositional Details and Descriptors
Provide further details about the subject, including medium, additional details, and color that describe its appearance or features.
ie: oil painting, dark green.
03. Action
Describe what the subject is doing using verbs and adverbs.
ie: relaxing, sitting, fishing.
04. Setting
Provide information about the backdrop or setting of the scene.
ie: lush green park, small lake, several trees.
05. Meta Modifiers and Styling
Add any finishing touches to the description that affect the feel or appearance of the image or scene.
ie: partially sunlit, pointillism, in the style of Georges Seurat.
💡 To keep your writing brief, it's best to avoid copying big chunks of text from books or giving lengthy descriptions of emotions.
Iterating Your Prompts
Prompting, like other creative outlets, requires experimentation and several iterations. Adding more keywords can help narrow the sampling space and make the output more specific. To improve your prompt, add no more than two additional keywords with each iteration. This will help you assess how each added keyword affects your output.
Let's use the description of Seurat's painting as an example for iteration!
Prompt 1:
relaxing and sitting parisians, carrying parasols, white sailboats, small monkey, dogs, oil painting, mid-19th century clothing, in lush green park, pointillism, in style of Georges Seurat
Result: This first iteration includes a lot of the aspects of the original artwork, though let's focus more on the human subjects by removing dogs and small monkey from the prompt.
Prompt 2:
relaxing and sitting parisians, carrying parasols, white sailboats, oil painting, mid-19th century clothing, in lush green park, pointillism, in style of Georges Seurat
Result: This second iteration focuses more on the human subjects but also on the parasols, so let's de-emphasize the parasols. Let's also add the dogs back in-- like the original painting.
💡 You can emphasize and de-emphasize certain words or phrases using brackets and weighting, which you can read about here.
Final Prompt:
relaxing and sitting parisians, (carrying parasols:0.25), white sailboats, oil painting, mid-19th century clothing, in lush green park, (pointillism), in style of Georges Seurat
Result: The final version is close to what was envisioned, but feel free to continue refining your own work until it's exactly the way you want it. Remember to describe the scene in a way that the AI can understand while still letting your personal style shine through.