Picture this. You ask for a cozy candlelit cabin at night, with bright midday sun and crisp shadows. The AI gives you a cabin. It also gives you a sun that clearly has no idea what time it is. Nobody did anything wrong except you, and the prompt, which argued with itself in the middle of the sentence.
That moment is exactly what a Reddit user on r/PromptEngineering was getting at. When an image comes out wrong, they check two things first: does the prompt clearly describe the scene, and do any of the instructions contradict each other? They boiled it down to a 10-part checklist. Here’s how to use it.
Why It Matters 🧭
Most bad AI images aren’t bad luck. They come from a prompt that is vague, or one that quietly says two opposite things. One commenter compared it to planning an event: you need the who, the what, the where, the mood and the lighting, and if any of them clash, the whole thing falls apart. That’s a pretty good way to think about it. Imagine telling a caterer “formal black-tie dinner” and “casual backyard barbecue” in the same email. They’d call you back. The AI won’t call. It will just quietly try to do both and hand you something strange.
The checklist also helps when you prepare reference images for AI video, where one muddled frame can wobble through the whole clip. A hand with six fingers in a still image is a funny mistake. The same hand in a five-second video is a small horror movie.
One warning from the original post is worth remembering: more words can mean more contradictions. A longer prompt isn’t a better prompt. A clearer one is. If you catch yourself adding a fourth adjective to describe the same lamp, stop and ask whether you are helping the model or just giving it more ways to disagree with you.
The How-To: Your 10 Parts 🛠️
Run through these in order. You don’t need all ten every time, but you should know which ones you skipped on purpose.
- Subject: Who or what is in the image? Include the defining features, like “an elderly fisherman with a weathered face and a yellow raincoat” instead of just “a man.”
- Action: What are they doing? Spell out pose, direction and interaction. “Mending a net” tells the model far more than “standing there.”
- Setting: Location, time of day and the relevant surroundings. This is where the cabin-and-midday-sun mix-up usually starts, so check the time of day twice.
- Mood: The emotional tone of the scene. Calm, tense, nostalgic, playful. Pick one and let it lead.
- Camera: Shot size, viewpoint and framing. Close-up, wide shot, low angle, over the shoulder.
- Lighting: Source, direction, intensity and softness. Lighting is the part most people forget, and it changes the feel of an image more than almost anything else.
- Color: Main palette, saturation and contrast. “Muted teal and warm amber” gives the model something to aim at.
- Style: Photography, watercolor, 3D, illustration and so on. Choose one main style, because two competing styles tend to cancel each other out.
- Detail: Important textures, materials and small features. Think knitted wool, brushed steel or cracked leather.
- Exclusions: Unwanted elements or errors that keep showing up. If extra fingers or random text keep sneaking in, name them here.
Here is the example from the post, and it works well:
“A woman in a red dress looks back at a rainy street corner, using her left hand to gather her windblown hair. A streetlamp behind her casts a long shadow toward the foreground.”
You get a subject, an action, a setting, a light source and even a shadow direction. Nothing in it fights anything else. Notice, too, that the streetlamp is behind her and the shadow falls toward the viewer. The light and the shadow agree, and that small bit of logic is what makes the image feel believable.
Tips & Tricks 🎯
Make the scene physically clear. Use concrete cues like “soft light from camera-left,” “rough stone,” or “wind lifting loose strands of hair.” The model can’t read your mind, but it can read a clear light direction.
Describe actions with five questions. Who acts, what do they do, how, with whom, and why? If you can’t answer one of them, the model will make something up. For example, “a chef plates a dish” becomes much stronger as “a young chef carefully plates seared salmon for a waiting customer at the pass.”
Review the result with a six-point check. Look at these every time:
- Hands
- Facial features
- Lighting
- Perspective and contact (are feet actually touching the floor?)
- Material texture
- Whether the background belongs to the same scene
Then use whatever failed to guide your next revision. Fix one thing at a time, so you know what actually helped. If you change the lighting, the color and the camera angle all at once, you will never know which tweak saved the image.
Organize your input. If your tool supports it, keep these separate:
- Scene prompt: the image you want.
- Negative prompt: the unwanted elements.
- Settings: model, aspect ratio, references, seed and steps, where available.
Mixing all of that into one big paragraph is how contradictions sneak in. A handy habit is to keep a small notes file with your best prompts, so a version that worked once can become your starting point next time.
Your Turn ⚓
Next time an image goes sideways, don’t just hit regenerate. Walk the ten parts, hunt for the contradiction, fix it, and try again. Keep the scene clear, the relationships coherent and the lighting consistent.
Grab your last weird result, run it through the checklist, and see which part you skipped. Then tell the crew what you found.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How much detail is too much in an AI image prompt?
Less is often more. One reader found that over-describing a scene led to “absolute chaos,” because every extra detail is another chance for two instructions to clash. Before you generate, read the prompt once and check that the subject, action, lighting, and mood all point the same way. If a detail doesn’t serve the scene, cut it.
Q: Why does the background so often look pasted in, and how do I fix it?
Another reader called this one of the biggest giveaways, since a background that looks like it came from a different render can ruin an otherwise strong image. Check that the light direction, color temperature, and sharpness in the background match the subject. If they don’t, name the light source in the scene prompt (for example, “soft light from camera-left”) so it applies to everything in the frame.
Q: Can this checklist help with planning outside of image generation?
Yes, according to one reader who plans events. They said the same structure of subject, action, setting, mood, and lighting works for planning a live event, and the same rule applies: if those pieces contradict each other, the whole thing falls apart. That makes it a handy habit for any project where several moving parts have to fit together.
A 10-part checklist for clearer AI image prompts
by u/Fun_Walk_4965 in PromptEngineering