What Are Negative Prompts?

Negative prompts tell AI image generators what you DON'T want in your image. While positive prompts describe desired elements, negative prompts exclude unwanted ones. This seemingly simple concept dramatically improves AI art quality and gives you much finer control over results.

Think of it like sculpture: positive prompts add material, negative prompts chisel away what doesn't belong. Together, they shape your vision precisely.

How Negative Prompts Work

AI image generators create images by starting with noise and progressively refining it toward your prompt. During this process:

Positive prompts guide the AI toward certain features, pushing the image to include specified elements.

Negative prompts actively push away from certain features, steering the generation away from unwanted elements.

The AI balances these opposing forces, resulting in images that emphasize what you want while avoiding what you don't. This dual guidance system provides much more control than positive prompts alone.

Platform Support

Different platforms handle negative prompts differently:

Stable Diffusion: Full negative prompt support. Essential for quality results. Separate text field in most interfaces.

Midjourney: Uses --no parameter instead of separate field. Example: --no text, watermark, blur

DALL-E: Limited native support. Can sometimes be worked around with phrasing, but less effective than other platforms.

Leonardo AI: Full support similar to Stable Diffusion.

This guide focuses primarily on Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, where negative prompts have the strongest impact.

Essential Negative Prompts

Start with these foundational negative prompts:

Quality Control:
"blurry, low quality, low resolution, poorly drawn, bad anatomy, wrong anatomy, extra limbs, missing limbs, floating limbs, disconnected limbs, mutation, mutated, ugly, disgusting, out of frame, out of focus"

Artifacts and Errors:
"jpeg artifacts, compression artifacts, watermark, text, signature, username, logo, cropped, worst quality, normal quality"

Hand/Face Issues:
"bad hands, extra fingers, missing fingers, fused fingers, too many fingers, mutated hands, malformed hands, extra hands, bad face, asymmetric eyes, cross-eyed, deformed face"

These negatives address the most common AI image generation problems and should be included in nearly every prompt.

Style-Specific Negatives

Tailor your negatives to your desired style:

For Photorealistic Images:
"cartoon, anime, drawing, painting, illustration, sketch, digital art, 3d render, cgi, unrealistic, fake, artificial"

For Anime/Illustration:
"photorealistic, realistic, photograph, photo, 3d, 3d render, hyperrealistic, real life, stock photo"

For Digital Art:
"photography, photograph, realistic, photorealistic, real, traditional art, oil painting, watercolor"

For Clean Backgrounds:
"busy background, cluttered, noisy background, complex background, detailed background, distracting elements"

Advanced Negative Prompt Strategies

Level up your negative prompting:

Weight Negatives: In Stable Diffusion, weight negative terms for emphasis: (blurry:1.3), (bad hands:1.5). Higher weights more aggressively avoid those elements.

Be Specific to Your Issue: If you're getting unwanted elements in results, add them to negatives. Getting unwanted glasses? Add "glasses, spectacles, eyewear." Unwanted hats? Add "hat, cap, headwear."

Counter Unintended Associations: Some positive prompt words have unintended associations. If "fantasy warrior" keeps giving you excessive armor, add "heavy armor, bulky armor" to negatives.

Use Synonyms: Cover variations of unwanted elements. For no text: "text, writing, words, letters, typography, font, caption, watermark, logo, signature."

Solving Common Problems with Negatives

Problem: Distorted faces
Add: "deformed face, ugly face, bad proportions, asymmetric face, weird face, distorted features, bad eyes, crossed eyes"

Problem: Extra or missing limbs
Add: "extra limbs, missing limbs, extra arms, extra legs, missing arms, missing legs, floating limbs, disconnected limbs, extra body parts"

Problem: Blurry or low-quality output
Add: "blurry, out of focus, bokeh, depth of field, soft focus, low resolution, pixelated, compression, artifacts, noise"

Problem: Unwanted objects appearing
Add: specifically name unwanted objects. "no person, no animal, no building" or whatever keeps appearing

Problem: Wrong style bleeding through
Add: explicitly name the unwanted style. If anime elements appear in realistic prompts, add "anime, cartoon, animated, cel-shaded"

Negative Prompts in Midjourney

Midjourney uses --no instead of a separate negative prompt field:

Basic Usage: Add at the end of your prompt: --no text, watermark, blur

Multiple Negatives: Separate with commas: --no people, animals, vehicles, text

Combining with Other Parameters:
"beautiful landscape, mountains, sunset --ar 16:9 --v 6 --no people, buildings, text"

Limitations: Midjourney's --no is less powerful than Stable Diffusion's full negative prompts. It works best for excluding concrete objects rather than abstract qualities.

Building Your Negative Prompt Templates

Create reusable negative prompt templates for different purposes:

Portrait Template:
"blurry, bad anatomy, bad face, bad eyes, asymmetric eyes, deformed face, extra limbs, missing limbs, bad hands, extra fingers, missing fingers, cropped, out of frame, low quality, worst quality, text, watermark, signature"

Landscape Template:
"blurry, low quality, oversaturated, undersaturated, text, watermark, people, person, human, buildings, man-made structures, cropped, out of frame, ugly, worst quality"

Product Photography Template:
"blurry, low quality, low resolution, bad lighting, harsh shadows, overexposed, underexposed, text, watermark, background objects, cluttered, busy background, worst quality"

Anime/Character Template:
"photorealistic, realistic, 3d render, bad anatomy, extra limbs, missing limbs, bad hands, extra fingers, missing fingers, poorly drawn face, bad proportions, gross proportions, text, watermark, worst quality"

Tips and Best Practices

Start with essentials, then add: Begin with basic quality negatives and add specific ones based on results you're getting.

Don't overload: Too many negative prompts can confuse the AI or lead to unexpected results. Keep it focused on actual problems.

Iterate: Adjust negatives based on results. If something unwanted appears, add it. If you're not getting expected results, remove overly broad negatives.

Match to model: Different Stable Diffusion models respond differently to negatives. What works for one may not work for another.

Test without negatives first: Sometimes understanding baseline output helps you craft better negatives.

Conclusion

Negative prompts are one of the most powerful yet underutilized tools in AI art generation. They give you sculpting control—removing unwanted elements as precisely as you add desired ones.

Start with the essential quality negatives, add style-specific terms based on your goals, and refine based on your results. Over time, you'll develop intuition for which negatives solve which problems.

Build your personal library of negative prompt templates and continue refining them. The investment in mastering negative prompts pays off exponentially in better, more controllable AI art.