30 image prompt templates, and the four things that make one work

Most disappointing image generations are not model failures — they are under-specified prompts. "Make me look like a 1980s movie star" gives the model a decade and nothing else, so it invents the lighting, the wardrobe and the film stock, and you get something that could have come from any year. The Image Prompts Studio is our answer to that: 30 templates, 128 prompt sets, each one written for a specific look and shipped with the model, aspect ratio and resolution it was built for.

What a prompt needs before it produces a look

• Subject — who or what, and what must not change. For a photo-restyle template that means naming the features to keep: the exact facial features, face shape, eyebrows and eye spacing.
• Light — the shape and direction of it, not its mood. "A single large softbox key from camera left plus a warm rim light from behind" is a look; "nice lighting" is a wish.
• Material and medium — satin, matte polymer clay, offset print, 35mm film. This is what separates a photograph from an illustration of one.
• Defects — the part everyone skips. Film grain, halation around the highlights, soft corner falloff, a faint fold line: imperfections are what make a render read as a printed page rather than a render.

Why the prompt stays in English

A prompt set arrives in English and is sent in English, in every language of the site. These models follow English most precisely, and the words that do the work — softbox key, halation, dot pattern, shallow depth of field — are English terms of art. Translating them replaces precision with approximation, and the picture gets vaguer. Your own words are a different thing: type your idea in any language and it is fine, because the models read it as subject matter rather than as craft.

Everything around the prompt is translated, though: the template description, the guidance for each prompt set, the notes on what to change when a result goes wrong. And the text that appears inside the picture is a separate control, which is the one part we do localise on request — that mechanism, and what it actually does to a render, has its own post: /blog/ai-image-text-language.

Templates do not always fit the model you picked

Each set recommends an aspect ratio, and not every model offers it. The 4:5 crop Instagram runs on does not exist in the GPT Image family’s enum, for instance. Rather than refuse the combination or silently ignore it, we resolve it against the model’s own capability table and say so on the card: 4:5 becomes 3:4, the shape stays portrait, and the price never goes up because of the adjustment. Switch to a model that does offer it and the card goes back to what the template asked for.

How to use one without fighting it

• Generate the first image unchanged. It is the reference point; every later comparison is against it.
• Change one thing at a time. A different model, a different ratio, a different subject line — not all three, or you will not know which one helped.
• Use the draft tier to find the framing, then the expensive tier for the keeper. The cheapest set in the studio is 3 credits; the dearest is 24.
• Read the failure notes on the template before you rewrite the prompt. They exist because that is where the result usually goes wrong, and each one names the sentence to change rather than the word to swap.

The studio is at /image-prompts-studio, with every template on its own page (for example /image-prompts-studio/80s-glamour) so the prompt text can be read and copied without opening the tool. Everything generated there is filed under “Prompts Studio” in your library, next to — not mixed into — your other work.