Six prompt mistakes that waste credits
Negatives, keyword soup, contradictions and the other habits that quietly cost you images.
SamImageGenerator ·
The first mistake is writing what you do not want. "No people" mentions people, and mentioning a thing makes it more likely, not less. Describe the empty street instead — "an empty street at dawn" gets you what "a street with no people" does not.
Five more that quietly cost credits
The second is keyword soup. A comma-separated pile of adjectives reads as a weak sentence to a model trained on captions; one plain sentence with a subject, a setting and a light beats twenty tags. The third is contradiction: "minimalist and highly detailed" asks for two opposite things, and you get the average of both, which is neither.
The fourth is asking for text. Words inside an image are unreliable in every generator, and the longer the phrase the worse it gets. If the picture needs a headline, generate the picture and put the text on afterwards in any layout tool.
The fifth is regenerating instead of editing. If a result is ninety per cent right, another generation throws away the ninety and rolls the dice again. Upload it, brush the part that is wrong and describe just that — the rest of the frame stays exactly as it was.
The sixth is changing three things at once. When a result is wrong and you rewrite half the prompt, you learn nothing about which word did the work. Change one thing per run.
A checklist before you press generate
| Check | Fix if it fails |
|---|---|
| Does it name a subject and a setting? | Add the missing one |
| Does it say anything about light? | Add a time of day or a source |
| Does it say how close the camera is? | Add close-up, wide, eye level |
| Are any two words fighting? | Delete the weaker one |
| Is it a sentence, not a tag list? | Rewrite it as a sentence |
Run through it once and most disappointing results stop happening. The five parts of a prompt is the long version of the same list, and if the image you want is a fix to a photo you already have, the shortest route is editing instead.