45 ChatGPT Prompts for Pictures (Copy & Paste)

Most picture prompt articles assume you already speak photography. They tell you to specify f/1.8 and volumetric lighting and a 24mm perspective, which is fine if you know what those do and useless if you do not.

This one is written the other way round. There are five things that change a picture, all of them describable in ordinary words, and once you know them you can write your own prompts rather than borrowing them. The forty-five below all use those five things, so reading them is also learning them.

If you already know your way around a camera and want the technical version, our ChatGPT prompts for image generation are pitched for that instead. For prompting technique across every other kind of task, see the main ChatGPT prompts guide.

Almost every picture prompt that works says these five things. None of them requires any technical vocabulary at all.

• Where the light comes from. From the left, from behind, from below, or one lamp in the corner. This changes a picture more than anything else you can write, and it is the first thing to change when a result disappoints.
• Where the camera is. Very close, from above, from behind, at a child's height. Leave this out and you get the same middle-distance view every single time.
• What things are made of. Brushed steel, coarse linen, chipped enamel, wet stone. Naming the material is what makes a picture look real rather than rendered.
• What kind of picture it is. A photograph, an oil painting, a watercolour, a flat printed poster. Say it, or you will get a generic digital illustration that belongs to no medium.
• What shape it is, and where the empty space goes. Wide, tall, square, with room on the left for text. Say it and you get something you can actually use without cropping it first.

Without those five:

A beautiful picture of a coffee pot, high quality, professional.

With them:

A matte black ceramic coffee pot on a plain pale grey background, photographed from slightly above and to one side. One big soft light from above and slightly in front, with a white card below to lift the shadow. Clean, no clutter, no reflections of the studio in the glaze.

Notice that beautiful, high quality and professional have all gone, and nothing was lost. None of them told the model anything it could act on.

Portraits come down to two decisions: where the light is, and how close you are. Get those right and you can leave everything else vague.

1. Window light portrait

A portrait of an older man sitting near a window, looking out rather than at the camera. The only light comes from the window on his left, so one side of his face is bright and the other falls into shadow. Plain dark wall behind him. Close enough to see the lines around his eyes.

2. Somebody at work

A baker at four in the morning, dusting flour off her hands. Shot from across the counter so you can see the whole kitchen behind her. One warm overhead bulb, everything else in shadow. Real and tired, not smiling for a camera.

3. A child, from their height

A child crouched in a garden looking at something in the grass, photographed from their eye level rather than from an adult's. Soft late-afternoon light coming from behind them. Green and gold, blurred background.

4. Hands instead of a face

Close-up of a pair of hands holding a chipped mug, resting on a wooden table. Soft light from a window to the left. You should be able to guess the person's age and their job from the hands alone.

5. Two people, one talking

Two friends on a park bench, one talking with their hands, the other listening. Photographed from a few metres away so they do not look posed. Overcast light with no harsh shadows. Autumn colours.

6. Somebody mid-movement

A dancer mid-turn in a bare studio, one foot off the floor. Hard light from a single high window. High ceilings and a scuffed wooden floor. Sharp enough to freeze the movement completely.

7. Silhouette in a doorway

A person standing in an open doorway, lit only from behind so they read as a dark shape with a bright outline. Nothing visible of their face. Warm light outside, cool dark room in front.

8. A group photo that is not stiff

A family of five in a kitchen, nobody looking at the camera, all doing something different. Shot from the doorway. Natural daylight. Slightly cluttered, clearly a real kitchen.

9. Portrait in strong colour

A young woman against a wall painted one strong colour, wearing something in a colour that clashes with it. Flat even light with no shadows at all. Head and shoulders, centred, looking straight at the camera.

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Say what the person is doing rather than how they feel. A baker dusting flour off her hands reads as tired without you having to write tired.

Landscapes and interiors depend almost entirely on the time of day and the weather. Naming an hour does more than describing the place. Working text to image, these are the easiest group to get a good result from on the first try.

10. Mountain at first light

A misty mountain valley at sunrise, ridgelines fading into haze one behind another. The sun is low and behind the peaks so their edges glow. Wet rock in the foreground. Very wide, so it feels big.

11. Empty street at night

A narrow city street at night with nobody in it. Wet from rain, so the shop signs reflect on the ground. The only light comes from the signs and one streetlamp. Deep shadows, strong colours.

12. Inside an old greenhouse

The inside of an old greenhouse on a grey morning. Soft light through frosted glass, condensation on the panes. Muted greens and terracotta pots. No sunshine anywhere.

13. Coast from directly above

A tropical shoreline seen from directly overhead, where the shallow reef meets white sand. Pale turquoise fading into deep blue. Bright midday sun. Square shape.

14. A room that tells you something

An empty living room where somebody clearly lived for a long time. Marks on the walls where pictures hung, one chair left behind. Grey afternoon light through bare windows. Nothing dramatic.

15. Desert at the end of the day

Open desert at dusk with a single parked vehicle, small in the frame. Burnt orange ground and a deep violet sky. Long shadows stretching towards the camera.

16. Forest in fog

A dense forest wrapped in low fog with one narrow path leading into it. Deep green and grey, almost no other colour. Eye level, so it feels like you are standing there.

17. A window seen from outside

A lit window seen from a snowy street at night. Warm light inside, cold blue outside. You can just make out movement behind the glass but not who it is.

18. Somewhere ordinary, made interesting

A supermarket car park at golden hour, completely empty, shadows stretching across the tarmac. Cracked surface picked out by the low sun. Nothing else in the picture at all.

If a place comes back looking like a postcard, take something out rather than adding something. Emptiness is what makes a landscape feel like somewhere real.

Objects are where naming the material pays off most. Chipped enamel, brushed steel, coarse linen. You can generate these straight from an AI image generator without a chat step at all.

19. Product on a clean background

A matte black ceramic coffee pot on a plain pale grey background, photographed from slightly above and to one side. One big soft light from above and slightly in front, with a white card below to lift the shadow. Clean, no clutter, no reflections of the studio.

20. Food that looks eaten

A half-finished breakfast on a scuffed enamel plate, seen from directly above. Crumbs, a used knife, a napkin off to one side. Hard light from the right so the shadows are defined. Space on the left for text.

21. Something old and worn

A rusted iron door hinge, very close up. Layers of orange and brown corrosion, flakes lifting away from the metal underneath, one patch of surviving green paint. Soft even light. Honest rather than romantic.

22. Glass and light

A cut-glass decanter half full of amber liquid on a dark surface. Hard light coming through it from behind, so the facets throw sharp patterns onto the surface behind. Charcoal background.

23. Fabric very close up

Very close on coarse undyed linen, close enough to see individual threads and the lumps in the weave. Light raking across from the right to bring out the texture. Oatmeal and cream, nothing else.

24. Tools where they are used

A woodworker's bench with the tools where they were put down mid-job rather than arranged. Warm light from one side window. Sawdust, shavings, visible wood grain. Slightly untidy.

25. One flower

A single wilting tulip in a plain glass of water on a windowsill. Overcast light from behind it. Pale washed-out colours. Plenty of empty space all around it.

26. Metal that reads as metal

A brushed steel watch case, extremely close up, so you can see the fine brushing marks going one way and one polished edge catching a hard line of light. Grey rather than silver. No fingerprints.

27. Packaging that does not exist yet

Three recycled paper bottles with pastel green and coral labels, arranged flat on a textured cream background and seen from above. A few fresh berries and one mint sprig scattered nearby. Soft even light, almost no shadow.

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Add one imperfection. A dent, a fingerprint, a chip you decided to keep. Flawless surfaces are the clearest sign that a picture was generated.

Invented subjects are where people over-reach. One impossible element in an otherwise ordinary picture works far better than a world where everything is strange.

28. A tree that should not be there

An enormous tree growing inside a dark cave, its leaves glowing cyan and violet. That glow is the only light in the picture. Waterfalls falling into a pool at its roots. One tiny person on a ledge so you understand the scale.

29. A creature that could exist

A creature that is part wolf and part owl, crouched silently on a mossy branch at night. Feathers across the shoulders, fur over the body, wide amber eyes. Cool moonlight from behind. Close enough to see individual hairs and feather barbs.

30. A city somewhere impossible

A whole walled city built on the back of an enormous slow-moving sea turtle, wading through shallow water. Tiny boats around its feet. Warm evening light from the side, long shadows across the water.

31. Something ordinary at the wrong scale

A full-size whale floating peacefully above a small bonsai garden on a wooden table. Soft daylight from a window, no drama at all. Muted greens and greys. Calm rather than frightening.

32. A door in a tree

A small carved door at the base of an old oak, slightly ajar, warm light coming from inside. Late afternoon light through the leaves. Nobody visible. Moss and roots around the threshold.

33. A machine nobody built

An enormous brass machine of unclear purpose, half buried in sand, still slowly turning. Hard desert sun. Verdigris on the brass, sand caught in the mechanism. Wide shot so the scale reads.

34. A sky that is wrong

An ordinary suburban street on an ordinary afternoon, except there are two moons in the sky and nobody has noticed. Flat daylight. Everything else completely normal.

35. Somebody from a story

An alien astronomer with elongated features and iridescent skin, studying a floating star map. The map's light reflects across their face. Deep indigo, teal and gold. Painterly rather than photographic.

36. A place with no doors

An underground city carved from stone with no doors anywhere, corridors receding into darkness. One figure with a lamp, very small in the frame. Warm lamp light against cold stone.

Keep one impossible thing and make everything around it ordinary. Two or three competing impossibilities cancel each other out and produce mush.

Mood comes from the palette and the kind of picture, not from adjectives. Each of these names both. If you want something deliberately comic, our ChatGPT caricature prompts cover that, and the caricature trend explains where the style came from.

37. Quiet and empty

One bench beside a completely still lake at dawn, the reflection as sharp as the real thing. Pale pink and grey. Symmetrical, with the horizon exactly in the middle. No wind, no birds, nobody.

38. Warm and cluttered

A second-hand bookshop interior with stacks of books on the floor and one reading lamp on. Warm tungsten light, deep shadows in the corners. Browns, ochres and a hint of green.

39. Cold and clean

A minimalist white room with one low wooden bench and nothing else in it. Hard light through a large window casting one sharp shadow across the floor. White, pale wood, one grey edge.

40. Loud and saturated

A narrow street packed with neon signs at night after rain, every colour reflected on the wet ground. Magenta and cyan dominant. Deep blacks. Very high colour.

41. Faded and nostalgic

A family at a beach in the 1970s, photographed on film that has aged. Washed-out warm colours, slight blur at the edges, one faint scratch. Ordinary rather than posed.

42. Painterly rather than photographic

A rain-soaked street at night painted in thick oils, brushstrokes visible and standing off the canvas. Umber, oxblood and cold white. Soft edges everywhere, no fine detail.

43. Graphic and flat

A stylised mountain landscape as a flat screen-printed poster. Three colours only: teal, cream and burnt orange. Visible paper texture and a slight misalignment between the printed layers. No shading.

44. Soft and small

A tiny mouse in a hand-knitted scarf sitting on a mushroom cap at night, drawn in watercolour with fine ink lines. Pastel lilac and mint. Blurred grass in the foreground. Storybook rather than cartoon.

45. Unsettling without anything scary

An ordinary suburban street on a Sunday afternoon where nothing is wrong and something feels wrong. Flat overcast light. Nobody outside. Very slightly too tidy.

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Name two or three colours rather than asking for a mood. Pale pink and grey produces quiet; the word quiet produces whatever the model already thought quiet looked like.

The useful habit for anybody starting out is to change one thing per attempt. If you rewrite the light, the camera position and the style all at once you will not know which change helped, and the next five attempts become guesswork. GPT Image 2.0 keeps earlier versions in the conversation, which makes that discipline much easier to hold.

One more thing worth knowing: fixing a picture you already have is a different job from making a new one, and it needs a differently written prompt. Our ChatGPT prompts for photo editing cover that, and ChatGPT explains what the model can and cannot do with an image. Chat Smith is free to try if you want to run a few of these first.