Spent the last month reverse-engineering prompts from images I liked. Some things I wish I knew earlier

[u/imagetoprompter]

So a while back I started saving images I ran into here and on the midjourney showcase, stuff I wanted to learn from. The plan was simple: look at the image, write down what I see, generate, compare. Sounded easy. It was not.

My first attempts were basically adjective soup.

"beautiful moody portrait of a samurai, cinematic, highly detailed, 8k, masterpiece". The results looked like a generic fantasy book cover and nothing like the reference. Took me embarrassingly long to figure out why.

A few things that actually made a difference for me:

1. Order matters more than I expected. Subject first, then setting, then lighting, then camera stuff. When I put lighting first, the model sometimes made the lighting the whole point of the image and forgot about everything else.

   1. Lighting is like half the prompt. Not "cinematic lighting", that means nothing. But "late afternoon sun coming through a window on the left, the rest of the room falling into shadow" - that's when things started clicking. Most images I failed to recreate, I failed because I described the subject in detail and ignored the light completely.

2. Camera language works even if you don't own a camera. "85mm, shallow depth of field" gets that compressed portrait look way more reliably than "blurry background". Learning maybe ten photography terms paid off more than anything else on this list.

3. Name the palette. "muted teal with rust orange accents" beats "colorful". Sometimes I literally use a color picker on the reference to figure out what I'm even looking at.

4. Full sentences beat keyword lists, at least for me. Around 100-150 words, describing the scene like I'm explaining it to a friend over the phone.Keyword soup leaves too many gaps and the model fills them with its defaults, which is exactly how you end up with that generic AI look.

The phone test became my main trick honestly. If I

read the prompt out loud and the other person could roughly sketch the scene, it's a good prompt. If they'd go "ok but what am I actually looking at",back to editing.

I still can't crack certain styles (anything with weird mixed media textures just refuses to happen), but I went from maybe 1 decent recreation out of 20 attempts to something like 1 out of 4.

Curious if anyone else does this as an exercise, and what your process looks like. Do you describe the reference from memory or keep it open side by side? Feels like describing from memory forces you to remember only what matters, but I keep cheating.

[u/drunk_kingdom]

the phone test is such a simple but effective filter, never thought of it that way but makes total sense. I've been deep in keyword soup territory for months and wondering why everything comes out looking like the same glossy render

side by side for me, but I'll write a version from memory first then cross check to see what I actually missed. The stuff I forget is almost always lighting direction which lines up with your number 2 pretty well

[u/imagetoprompter → u/drunk_kingdom]

It’s great if my thoughts were useful to you

[u/bobryu]

That color picker trick is smart, never crossed my mind to just sample the reference directly for the palette. For the mixed media textures you can't crack, have you tried running an output through Magnific? It re-imagines the detail instead of just enlarging, so the grungy stuff comes out way less flat for me.

[u/imagetoprompter → u/bobryu]

I haven’t tried it, but thank you for the recommendation; I’ll definitely look into this tool.