How to Make AI Images That Don't Look Fake

You know the look. That slightly too-smooth skin. The weird hands. The lighting that's technically correct but feels like it came from nowhere. The background that looks like a stock photo someone dreamed. AI images have a signature quality that people have gotten really good at recognizing, and honestly it makes sense, a lot of people are generating a lot of images with similar defaults and similar mistakes.

I've been generating AI images pretty obsessively for the past year. I use Midjourney mostly, but I've spent time with Flux, Ideogram, and a few others. And through a lot of trial and error I've figured out what actually makes an image look like a photograph or a thoughtful illustration rather than "AI image." Here's what I've learned.

Vague prompts produce generic images

This is the root of most AI image problems. When you write "a woman standing in a coffee shop" you're giving the model almost no information to work with. So it produces the most average possible version of that scene. Average lighting. Average clothes. Average expression. Average everything. And "average everything" is exactly what the AI aesthetic looks like.

Specificity is what creates the feeling of intention. Real photographs are specific. Real illustrations are specific. A specific location, a specific time of day, specific light hitting from a specific direction, that's what makes something feel real rather than generated.

Compare "a woman standing in a coffee shop" to "a woman in her early 30s sitting at a corner table in a small independent coffee shop, afternoon light coming through a window to her left, she's looking slightly off camera, there's a half-finished latte on the table, the walls have exposed brick." That second prompt gives the model enough to work with that it can stop defaulting to average.

Lighting is the thing most people skip

Real photographers obsess over light. It's literally what photography is, capturing light. AI image prompts that don't specify lighting end up with this flat, bright, sourceless illumination that looks like a product render rather than a photo.

The lighting terms that have made the biggest difference in my prompts: golden hour light, overcast diffused light, harsh midday sun, single light source from [direction], window light, candlelight, fluorescent office light. These tell the model not just how bright something is but where the light is coming from and what quality it has. Soft vs. hard shadows change everything about how real an image feels.

I'd also say: don't be afraid to ask for imperfect light. Real photos aren't perfectly exposed. Slight overexposure in the highlights. A little shadow falling where you don't expect it. Adding words like "slightly underexposed" or "high contrast" or even "harsh shadows" often produces something that looks way more like an actual photograph.

Camera and lens details make a huge difference

This one feels technical but it's genuinely one of the highest-use things you can add to an image prompt. Specifying a camera type or lens changes the entire aesthetic of what comes out.

A few that I use a lot: "shot on 35mm film," "85mm portrait lens," "wide angle lens, slight distortion at edges," "shot on a disposable camera," "medium format film photography." Each of these creates a different visual quality, different grain, different depth of field, different distortion characteristics. They make the image look like it was actually captured with equipment rather than rendered by an algorithm.

Film grain in particular. Adding "slight film grain" or "35mm film" to almost any realistic image prompt makes it look more real, not less. I know that sounds counterintuitive, you're adding imperfection. But those imperfections are what our eyes associate with photographs of real things. Clean and perfect is what we associate with CGI.

The hands problem and how to deal with it

AI hands are infamous at this point. The models have gotten better but hands still trip them up more than anything else. My approach is either: prompt in a way that avoids hands entirely (composition where hands aren't visible, or hands out of frame), or prompt for them explicitly and accept that you might need to regenerate a few times.

When I need hands in an image, I add something like "hands clearly visible, natural relaxed position, correct anatomy." Flagging it explicitly seems to make the model pay more attention to it. I've also found that prompting for specific hand positions helps, "hands wrapped around a coffee cup" gives the model a constraint to work with rather than just generating freeform hands.

For anything where I can avoid it though, I just crop or compose around them. "Waist-up shot" or "portrait, face and shoulders only" solves the problem before it starts.

Style references do the heavy lifting

One of the most effective things you can add to an image prompt is a reference to a specific visual style, photographer, or era. Not a living artist (there are obvious reasons to be careful there) but styles are totally fair game.

"1970s documentary photography style" tells the model so much, the colors, the grain, the framing tendencies, the aesthetic values of that era. "Wes Anderson aesthetic" communicates symmetry, pastel palette, slightly artificial staging. "Ansel Adams landscape" means black and white, dramatic contrast, environmental grandeur. These shorthand references pack in a ton of stylistic information in just a few words.

I've also found that referencing a specific decade for the photo style works really well even for contemporary subjects. "Shot in the style of 1990s editorial photography" on a modern portrait creates this slightly nostalgic, printed-magazine quality that makes images feel much more intentional than default AI output.

What to do when it still looks fake

Sometimes you do all of this and the image still has that quality. Here's my checklist when I'm not happy with outputs.

• Add more environmental specificity, give the model more to work with in the scene
• Try adding "photorealistic" or "documentary style" if it's still looking too rendered
• Change the composition, sometimes asking for a different angle completely changes the output quality
• Add imperfections explicitly: grain, slight blur, ambient noise, worn texture, natural shadows
• Try a different model, some models do certain types of images much better than others

And honestly sometimes you just regenerate. Not everything you prompt is going to work and that's fine. Even professional photographers delete most of their shots.

The mindset shift that helped me most

I used to think of AI image prompts like writing a description. Like I was describing a scene for someone to visualize. Once I started thinking about them more like photography briefs, specifying equipment, light conditions, time of day, film type, distance from subject, depth of field, my outputs got noticeably better.

You're not describing what something looks like. You're describing how it was captured. That shift in thinking changes what details you include, and those details are what separate images that feel real from images that look like they were generated by software. Which, yes, they were. But the good ones don't make you think about that.