UGC-Style Photo Prompts

Core principle

Image models default to polish: symmetric features, smooth retouched skin, studio lighting, clean backgrounds. That polish is the single biggest tell that an image is AI-generated, and it's exactly what kills performance for UGC ads and influencer content — the entire point of UGC is that it doesn't look produced.

Telling the model "make it look realistic" doesn't work, because "realistic" isn't a style the model can target — it's an absence of all the polish defaults, and the model needs that absence written into every slot of the prompt as a specific physical detail. Realism comes from specificity (a named flaw, a named light source, a named texture), not from the word "realistic" itself.

The 9-slot formula

Fill every slot, in this order, for every prompt: