How to Write an Image Brief That Actually Works

"A photo of a woman working on a laptop in an office."

You will get an image. It will be technically fine and completely generic, because you have described a category, not a picture. The model fills every gap you left with the average of everything it has seen — and you left almost every gap open.

What a usable brief names

Subject. Who or what, and what they are doing. Specifics beat adjectives: "mid-thirties, sleeves rolled up, mid-sentence on a call" is a picture; "professional woman" is a category.

Composition. Close-up or wide? Where does the subject sit in the frame? What is behind them? This is the single biggest lever and the one most often left out.

Lighting. Soft window light, hard overhead, golden hour, overcast. Lighting does more to set mood than any adjective you could add.

Palette. Name the colours, especially if the image sits next to your brand.

Mood. Calm, urgent, warm, clinical.

Aspect ratio. Where is it going — a hero band, a square post, a slide? Generating square and cropping to a banner wastes the composition you asked for.

Say what you do not want

Most tools accept a negative prompt, and it is where a lot of the frustration goes. Text artefacts, extra fingers, watermarks, stock-photo handshakes, clip-art gloss.

If a specific thing keeps appearing, name it explicitly. Models are much better at avoiding a named thing than at inferring taste.

Change one thing at a time

When an image is close but wrong, the instinct is to rewrite the whole prompt. Then you get something different-but-also-wrong and you have learned nothing.

Change one variable. Same prompt, harder light. Same prompt, wider crop. You build an actual sense of what each lever does, and you get there faster.

Describe style rather than naming artists

Two reasons. The practical one: a style description gives you more control than a name, which imports a whole bundle of associations you may not want. The other is that imitating a living artist by name is contested ground, ethically and legally, and it is easy to avoid.

Say what you mean instead: the flatness, the grain, the palette, the era.

Where AI images earn their place — and where they do not

They are good for atmosphere, abstract concepts, backgrounds, and filling a gap where you would otherwise use a bad stock photo.

They are poor at anything requiring precision — accurate text, real products, real people, technical diagrams, consistent characters across images. If accuracy matters, brief a designer or take a photograph.

The honest test

Before generating, describe the image aloud to someone who cannot see it. If they could not draw a rough version from your description, the model cannot either.