Stable Diffusion prompting cheatsheet

Last updated February 11th, 10:05   ｜   Added reference

Donate for civilians in Ukraine, Mali, Syria etc. Every single dollar helps. I handpicked these charities based on transparency rating and reputation (Source).

Red Cross | Doctors without borders | Feed the Children | DirectRelief

View examples I created with these prompt hacks Painting of a woman working at a table, holding a pen in one hand. She is gleefully looking at the viewer. Wearing a fancy blouse. Generated with Stable Diffusion/Waifu Diffusion. Painting of a girl sitting at a table with books on top, resting her head on her hand while daydreaming and smiling. Generated with Stable Diffusion/Waifu Diffusion. Painting of a girl with Mexican Catrina makeup, skull-like makeup. Generated with Stable Diffusion/Waifu Diffusion and a custom Textual Inversion embedding.
Check out img2prompt to turn any image you like into a prompt for inspiration.
Painting of sisters in Victorian England, flowers in their hair, raw output
The further to the beginning of the prompt a word is placed, the greater its effect. Use multiple exclamation marks !! to stress a word and brackets () to reduce its strength. The latter does not work with all implementations. In the Automatic1111 webui () will stress a word instead.

3D renders & realism

Will improve the image: unreal engine, octane render, bokeh, vray, houdini render, quixel megascans, arnold render, 8k uhd, raytracing, cgi, lumen reflections, cgsociety, ultra realistic, 100mm, film photography, dslr, cinema4d, studio quality, film grain

Will achieve specific style: analog photo, polaroid, macro photography, overglaze, volumetric fog, depth of field (or dof), silhouette, motion lines, motion blur, fisheye, ultra-wide angle

Try experimenting with the names of professional cameras (e. g. Fujifilm XT3 or Canon Eos 5D) and lens specifications (e. g. 80mm Sigma f/1.4 or any ZEISS lens).

2d art

Will improve the image: digital art, digital painting, trending on artstation, golden ratio, evocative, award winning, shiny, smooth, surreal, divine, celestial, elegant, oil painting (helps improve multiple styles), soft, fascinating, fine art, official art, keyvisual

Will achieve specific style: color page, halftone, character design, concept art, symmetry, pixiv fanbox (for anime/manga), trending on dribbble (for vector graphics), precise lineart, tarot card

Note that Stable Diffusion's output quality is more dependant on artists' names than those of DALL-E and Midjourney. Without atleast one artist name the output might look like a beginner's work. Finetuned models like Waifu Diffusion and NovelAI can work without artist names.
For Waifu Diffusion and NovelAI, use Danbooru tags for the best results because they are both trained on a Danbooru scrape.

Environments

stunning environment, wide-angle, aerial view, landscape painting, aerial photography, massive scale, street level view, landscape, panoramic, lush vegetation, idyllic, overhead shot

Detail

wallpaper, poster, sharp focus, hyperrealism, insanely detailed, lush detail, filigree, intricate, crystalline, perfectionism, max detail, 4k uhd, spirals, tendrils, ornate, HQ, angelic, decorations, embellishments, masterpiece, hard edge, breathtaking, embroidery

Lighting

bloom, god rays, hard shadows, studio lighting, soft lighting, diffused lighting, rim lighting, volumetric lighting, specular lighting, cinematic lighting, luminescence, translucency, subsurface scattering, global illumination, indirect light, radiant light rays, bioluminescent details, ektachrome, glowing, shimmering light, halo, iridescent, backlighting, caustics

Colors

vibrant, muted colors, vivid color, post-processing, colorgrading, tone mapping, lush, low contrast, vintage, aesthetic, psychedelic, monochrome

Negative prompts (derived from here, u/booktail & u/AcademicInside)

This requires an implementation that supports negative prompts, such as the Automatic1111 webui. It will prevent some common artifacts and result in better human portraits.
lowres, text, error, cropped, worst quality, low quality, jpeg artifacts, ugly, duplicate, morbid, mutilated, out of frame, extra fingers, mutated hands, poorly drawn hands, poorly drawn face, mutation, deformed, blurry, dehydrated, bad anatomy, bad proportions, extra limbs, cloned face, disfigured, gross proportions, malformed limbs, missing arms, missing legs, extra arms, extra legs, fused fingers, too many fingers, long neck