Beginner9 min

Killing the AI Look

People can spot AI images instantly: the plastic skin, the too perfect symmetry, the over saturated glow, the mangled hands. The good news is that almost every tell has a known fix. This lesson is a checklist you run on every image before you call it done.

Step 1: Add imperfection on purpose

Reality is messy. Photographs have grain, dust, slight blur, and asymmetry. Ask for them. Words like film grain, slight motion blur, skin texture with pores, candid, and amateur photo pull the model away from the glossy default.

natural-look.txt
candid photo of friends laughing at a kitchen table,
shot on a phone, slightly soft focus, visible skin texture,
natural indoor lighting, no studio polish, a little grain

Step 2: Tame the saturation and the glow

The default AI image is often too vivid and lit from everywhere at once. Ask for muted colors, overcast light, or a single light source. In Midjourney, lowering stylize toward 50 also calms the house style.

Step 3: Fix hands, eyes, and text

Hands and small text are still the weakest spots. Two fixes: generate at a higher resolution so detail is sharper, and when a hand is wrong, do not regenerate the whole image. Use the inpaint or vary region tool to repaint only that area.

Inpaint a broken hand
[ Original image ] hand has 6 fingers
Tool: Vary (Region) -> brush over the hand only
Region prompt: a natural relaxed left hand, 5 fingers
[ Result ] only the hand changed
Select only the hand, type a tiny prompt like a relaxed natural hand, and the rest of the image stays untouched.
The squint test
Shrink your image to thumbnail size and squint. If it still reads as a real photo, it will pass for most viewers. The tells almost always hide in the details, not the overall shape.

Result

Take any over polished image you made earlier and rerun it with the imperfection words added. Put the two side by side. The grainy, slightly imperfect version will almost always read as more real.

Hands-on tasks