What should I write in the prompt box?
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The prompt is optional. Choosing a style and a mode is often enough, and a bad prompt does more damage than no prompt at all. Where a prompt earns its place is in the specifics a style name cannot carry: the sofa you want to keep, the oak floor that should survive, the exact green you have already bought paint for.
Three rules #
Describe furniture, decor, materials, lighting, and color. Leave out people, animals, and anything violent or adult. Leave out logos, watermarks, and text overlays. Those are the three published guidelines, and everything else is preference. The limit is 1000 characters, which is far more room than a good prompt needs.
Name what stays, not just what changes #
The most useful sentence in most prompts is the one protecting something. Keep the existing oak flooring is a clearer instruction than any amount of description of what you want added, because it tells the model where the boundary is. Anchoring one or two real elements also makes the result easier to trust, since you can check them at a glance.
Weak prompts and stronger rewrites #
| Weak | Stronger |
|---|---|
| Make it look nice | Warm minimalist living room, cream boucle sofa, light oak coffee table. |
| Modern | Pick the Modern style instead. A one-word prompt adds nothing the style already carries. |
| Change everything | Keep the windows and flooring. Replace the sofa and rug with warm neutral pieces. |
| Open up the space | Ignored: the walls are held to your photo, so nothing structural moves. Try a lighter palette and fewer pieces for the same feeling. |
| Make it brighter and take it from the other side | Half ignored: the camera is held to your photo. Ask for brighter, and re-shoot for the other angle. |
| A paragraph about the room, who uses it, the light in the afternoon, and what you have always wanted it to feel like | Keep the oak floor. Warmer palette. Swap the rug. The model weights a short list far more heavily than the same instructions buried in prose. |
Be specific about materials, vague about arrangement #
Materials and colors take direction well: brushed brass, unlacquered, matte black, warm white oak, ribbed glass. Telling the model where to put something new takes it badly, because the layout is constrained by the room you photographed. Sofa against the left wall will often be ignored or produce something awkward, since the model is working within a fixed floor plan. Position used to point at something already in the room is the opposite case, and it is the next section.
Say which one, not just what #
When the thing you are changing has a twin in the photo, name where it is. Remove the staircase on the right is a different instruction from remove the staircase, and only the first one can be carried out with any confidence when the room has two. The position is not a request to move anything: it is how you point at the thing you mean, so the rest of the room is left alone. The same goes for the rug by the window, the left-hand window, the lamp on the console. If there is only one of something, the plain name is enough.
One change at a time #
A prompt asking for six changes usually delivers three of them well and three badly, and you cannot tell which instruction caused which problem. Two passes with two clear prompts beats one pass with a long one, and it also makes it obvious which step to redo. Length works against you the same way: everything you write competes for attention, so backstory and explanation dilute the instructions that matter. One or two lines does more work than a paragraph.
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