Prompts that create spooky lighting and ambience.
#Tip 11 - Use light and shadow to create ambience
unreal needle
Did you ever see a well-lit haunted house? Probably not. Sometimes it is what you can’t see clearly that creates a mood.
This tip will look at a few easy lighting cues that you can add to almost any subject. For this tip we will not add any art styles other than lighting effects. To help you see the light changes we will use a pumpkin as the subject for all the samples.
Here is “a pumpkin. horror movie lighting.”
Notice that in addition to the lighting effect, the pumpkin became ominous due to the “horror” keyword. Every word in the prompt affects the results.
We can tone down the horror effect by asking for ”a pumpkin. dramatic lighting.”
A close relative of “dramatic lighting” is “a pumpkin. rim lighting.”
Pumpkins look kind of creepy when lit like this.
There is less drama when we ask for “a pumpkin. backlighting.”
Another approach is to describe the shadows, not the light. Here is “a pumpkin. deep shadows.”
“a pumpkin casting a long shadow”
“shadow of a pumpkin on a wall”
To establish a color theme around the pumpkin you can use a photographic term, “gel lighting”, which affects the color of the light falling on the scene. Here is “a pumpkin. purple gel lighting.”
How about “a pumpkin. rainbow lighting”?
Don’t forget to try “a pumpkin. a glowing candle inside”:
You didn’t need to ask for a carved pumpkin. How else would we get the candle inside?
You can establish a lighting theme for a setting by giving a time of day, as in “a pumpkin in a window at sundown”
Be careful when describing settings, because everything you mention will become a goal for the AI, reducing focus on your main subject.
The setting can work with the lighting to produce interesting changes in the pumpkin based on associations in the training data. Here is “a pumpkin. cheerful lighting on a party table.”
