Photography Styles

How It Works

I’ve selected 4 base prompts a cross a few different types of photography: a maternity photoshoot, landscape photography, architectural photography, and landscape photography. This way, you can see how each prompt changes the resulting image.

As a control for our experiment, here’s what each prompt looks like without any style keywords.

This prompt creates soft dreamy photos that look like they’ve popped out of an otherworldly bubble gum bubble. They use pastelly pinks, purples, blues, and yellows. The photos are realistic, yet have a distinct feeling of otherworldliness.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

Adding “Selective color” to your prompt creates photos where the image’s colors are muted except for select, and purposeful places. This is often done to draw attention to a subject, or a specific area in the photo.

Midjourney tends to make the photos black and white except for the places it adds color. Firefly on the other end uses muted colors instead of black and white, and just makes the subject bright and colorful.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

This is one of the most popular lifestyle photo styles out there right now. If you want bright and modern stock-looking photos, this is the perfect prompt for you. Both AIs generate diverse subjects in a bright white environment. White is a popular color in the photos, the subjects are often depicted wearing white clothes.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

As the prompt suggest, dark and moody creates dark and dramatic photos that look like they were taken on the set of a film. Since the photos are dramatically lit and are cinematic in nature, the AIs have a little more fun with the composition, generating more uniques poses for its subjects.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

Natural and soft is a similar style to light and airy, but these photos come out looking a little less edited, and a little less white wash. More natural some might say.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

This prompt is more that meets the eye. While it does tend to make any prompt generate black and white images, sometimes it throws a little surprise in the mix. Monochrome means one color, and while the AI’s tend to interpret that to mean black, they often through a little surprise in there and tint photos with another color like navy, or green. It’s a great way to create an image with a lot of contrast without locking your self into black and white.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

Do you like colorful photos? Then this prompt is for you!

While many people assume contrast, and saturation are the main filters to use to add more color to your images, its truly vibrancy that make photos jump off the page as if they just came back from Holi.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Vibrant Colors

Gradient maps and fun tools that you can use to edit photos that blends the colors of a gradient to that of your photo.

Used as a prompt for an AI image generator tends to create fun results. These photos usually have unique color pallets, often purple and blue, or orange and red. Both pull out the natural colours of the photo. These photos usually appear as if they were taken during a sunrise/set as this is usually where gradients naturally occur, so this is where overlay would be at its most effective.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

An S curve is a shape you can make using Photoshop’s “Curves” Adjustment Layer. If you add two points roughly a third of the way apart from each other on the “Curves” grid, and then pull the left most point up, and the right most point down, you often get photos with deeper shadows, lighter highlights, and more vibrant colours.

The photos you get from using this term as a prompt follow the same template: they are more interesting photos with deeper shadows, lighter highlights, and more vibrant colours.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

Although, vibrancy is the best tool to bring out the color in your images in Photoshop, saturation is a good second best. The saturation slider is especially effective at making warm colours such as reds, yellows, and oranges, pop off the page. There’s no wonder that AI’s tend to generate photos using these vibrant warm tones when saturation is mentioned. These photos are bright, and colorful, deep.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

Color correction is the process used in multiple creative disciplines (photography, cinematography, etc.) where images are edited to better display color as it is seen by the human eye. Images that are color corrected look more natural to how people often see the world. Same goes for AI photos that are generated with this keyword: they are more natural looking photos.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

While the threshold adjustment layer in photoshop tends to give photos high contrast and make them black and white, it tends to only increase the contrast in AI images. While the black point of the shadows is increased and the white point of the highlights increased, the images are all usually all colored.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

HDR is the name for the editing style you might associate with the national geographic, photography coffee table books, or professional photographers such as Steve McCurry.

This creates photos with bright colors and high contrasting colors.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

In photography, the matte effect is supposed to rid any photo of true black colors so that the image looks flatter, and gives it more of a cinematic look to it. However, I find is has the opposite effect in AIs. If anything, I think the blacks look stronger, and the photos look deeper when “Matte Effect is used in the prompt. It’s almost as if the AI’s heard the words “black point” and “depth” used so much with Matte Effect that it learned the opposite association.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

Contrast, at is core, makes dark colors darker, and and light colors lighter. The ultimate contrast is black and white, so the word “color” is important in this prompt if you don’t want black and white images.

This prompt generates images just like it sounds: high contrast colored photos.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

Cross Processing is a photography editing technique that predates Photoshop and other photo editing software. Think dark rooms, and soaking photo-paper in citric acid kind of editing.

Photographers would soak the photos in the wrong chemicals intentionally, so that they could experiment with interesting and unpredictable color shifts and contrast.

This holds true when using it in AI prompts, it generates grungy, and low contrast photos with interesting color pallets. The photos have a retro but interesting vibe.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful

Adding cinematic to your prompt makes your photos more dramatically lit, it usually has higher quality props added to the background, and is usually taken from a unique, and interesting perspective.

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful, Cinematic

Double exposure is a popular photoshop effect where designers attempt to blend two images together. These images usually tell a story as the two images are superimposed overtop each other. This is especially effective when the one image is isolated on a white background, so the images generated are often light, with a fully white background. Interestingly enough, the landscape photos where the hardest photos to get to use this effect, even though nature photos are often used and the superimposed image in most double exposure images. Maybe the AIs didn’t have enough examples where nature was the main subject. 🤔

Firefly Effects: Photo, Beautiful, Double Exposure Portrait