Try it before you judge it: paste the prompt below into your image generator and see exactly what comes back.
The setup sounds fun. Cinema hall. Two characters sitting side by side facing the screen. One is a real person with a real uploaded face. The other is an Avatar-style blue alien, glowing dots and all, holding a popcorn bucket. Red velvet seats, cinematic lighting, both relaxed. It reads like a scene from a movie you’d actually want to watch.
The actual test? Keeping the human face exactly as-is. No smoothing. No AI-approved symmetry corrections. No “helpful” skin improvements you never asked for. The alien gets to be fully invented. The human has to stay fully real. That gap between how the model treats each character tells you something important about how it understands your instructions.
🎬 The Prompt to Run
From u/Chatgpt_PROMPT_11 on r/PromptEngineering:
Use the uploaded reference image as the base. Keep the face 100% original and unchanged. No face reshaping, beauty filters, or AI facial edits. Preserve real skin texture, facial features, expression, and identity exactly as-is. Create an ultra-realistic cinematic photo of two characters sitting side by side in a cinema hall. Character 1: young man (20-25), fair to wheatish skin, slim build, wearing a black hoodie, black joggers, white sneakers, black Apple smartwatch, and round eyeglasses, with a calm focused expression. Character 2: tall athletic blue alien (Avatar-style) with blue skin and glowing dotted patterns, long braided hair, tribal necklace and strap, holding a popcorn bucket. Both sit on red cinema seats, facing forward toward the movie screen, relaxed posture, legs forward, each holding a popcorn bucket with both hands. Natural cinematic lighting, ultra-realistic, AI-modified movie atmosphere.
Try this in Midjourney, DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion, or whatever tool you have open right now. The prompt was written with a specific uploaded reference photo, so swap in your own face photo when you run it. The closer your reference image is to a real, unedited photo, the more the test reveals.
👀 What Your Results Will Tell You
The alien is easy. Generators love alien characters. They have no reference point to “fix.” No training data full of idealized alien faces telling the model what a good alien is supposed to look like. It just builds what you described and moves on.
The face is where things get revealing. Your model will want to help. Smooth the skin. Nudge the proportions toward whatever it thinks a face should look like. It will do this even when you’ve explicitly told it not to. Watch for the small stuff: a slight narrowing of the nose, a sharpening of the jawline, pores disappearing, any asymmetry quietly corrected. These aren’t dramatic transformations. They’re soft, polite edits that the model delivers while technically following your instructions.
One community member hit this exact wall and flagged it: the model kept running quiet improvements despite the instructions. That’s not a bug in the prompt. That’s the model’s aesthetic bias showing up as helpfulness. It learned what faces “should” look like from millions of curated, filtered, retouched images, and that training doesn’t just disappear because you typed “unchanged.”
A useful thing to check: generate the scene twice with the same prompt and compare both outputs side by side. If the face drifts differently each time, the model is improvising. If both outputs drift in the same direction, toward the same idealized version of your reference, the model has a consistent opinion about your face. Both outcomes are interesting for different reasons.
💡 Tips If the Face Drifts
Generic preservation instructions leave too much room for interpretation. “Keep the face unchanged” is a direction. It’s not a constraint.
Tighten it by naming what unchanged actually means: “Preserve all natural asymmetries, blemishes, micro-expressions, and skin texture imperfections. Do not normalize facial proportions or apply any enhancement.” The more specific the instruction, the less creative latitude the model takes. You’re not being paranoid. You’re closing interpretation gaps that the model will otherwise fill with its own aesthetic defaults.
If your tool supports regional prompting, lock the face as a fixed region and let everything else generate freely around it. That structural separation works better than hoping instruction text holds. Some tools call this inpainting with a masked region or a ControlNet reference. The terminology varies, but the principle is the same: remove the face from the generative process entirely and treat it as a fixed input.
One more thing worth trying: describe the imperfections you actually want preserved. Not just “preserve skin texture” but “preserve the uneven skin tone, the faint under-eye shadow, the slight asymmetry in the left brow.” Named specifics are harder for the model to quietly round off than abstract preservation commands.
📸 Share What You Got
Run it. Come back. Did your model follow the brief or quietly decide it had better taste than you?
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why does the AI keep modifying my face even when I tell it not to?
Many AI image generators apply subtle beautification by default, smoothing skin, reshaping features, or adding filters. To prevent this, be explicit: add “no facial edits whatsoever,” “preserve all original proportions exactly,” and “maintain natural skin texture and imperfections.” Being overly specific about preservation tells the model to prioritize accuracy over enhancement.
Q: How detailed should my character descriptions be?
Very detailed. Instead of “young man with glasses,” describe: “fair to wheatish skin, calm focused expression, round eyeglasses, slim build, specific clothing items with colors.” The more concrete details you provide, the less creative freedom the AI takes, and the more control you keep over the final result.
Q: Should I use a reference image to protect the original face?
Yes, if your AI tool supports it. Upload the reference early in your prompt and explicitly state “use this uploaded image as the base” and “do not alter the face.” Some users find this helps, though results vary by tool, always review the output to confirm the face matches your source.
Try this Prompt and share your opinion with us.
by u/Chatgpt_PROMPT_11 in PromptEngineering