The handful of ingredients that separate a vague prompt from one that reliably works.
A prompt is not poetry and it is not a keyword list - it is a short brief. The creators who get consistently strong results are not the ones who know secret magic words; they are the ones who reliably cover the same handful of ingredients every time.
The six ingredients
- 1Subject - who or what is in the frame (your character handles this for you).
- 2Action - what they are doing, in one clear phrase.
- 3Setting - where it happens.
- 4Light - the single biggest lever on mood: soft window light, harsh noon sun, neon at night.
- 5Framing - close-up, wide shot, eye level, from above.
- 6Mood - the feeling the piece should leave behind.
Plain language beats keyword-stuffing
You do not need special syntax to get a great result. A short, plain sentence that covers action, setting and light - "sitting by a window in soft morning light, calm expression" - consistently beats a long string of disconnected keywords, because the model is reading for meaning, not matching tags.
When a character is attached, never re-describe the face or hair - the DNA handles identity. Spend your words on the scene instead; repeating appearance details can actually fight the lock.
These six ingredients apply everywhere in OnZero - images, video and even audio all reward the same clear, specific thinking. The next lesson goes deeper on the patterns that work specifically for images.