The one AI art trick that actually made my stuff look less fake

I kept seeing people using DALL-E 3 for detailed scenes but wondering why the hands and edges looked like melted play-doh. Turns out, if you drop the prompt complexity below 30 words and add a negative prompt for 'smooth plastic', the results get way sharper. Took me like 40 tries at 2am to figure that out. Anyone else notice a huge difference when you strip your prompts down to basics?

2 comments

2 Comments

uma_johnson29d ago

Oh man, that 'smooth plastic' negative prompt is a game changer, I know exactly what you mean. The default output always looked so waxy and weird to me too, like everything was dipped in glue. Dropping the prompt length makes such a huge difference, I think we all get carried away trying to describe every tiny detail. It's wild how a simple fix like that can save you from hours of frustration at 3am. Really glad you shared this, honestly, it makes me feel less crazy for obsessing over the small stuff.

holly_henderson8628d ago

Ha, 'obsessing over the small stuff' - I feel that in my soul. I once spent a whole weekend trying to fix a weird texture on a character's elbow, and it turned out I just had 'glossy' in the prompt twice. Completely agree about the prompt length thing too, I've been guilty of writing a whole paragraph about the lighting and forgetting to just say what the subject actually is. It's almost embarrassing how many 3am hours I've lost to that waxy look before figuring out the negative prompt trick.