How Transformational Prompting Works

Transformational prompting is about intentional variation. You keep the structure, subject, and mood of an image consistent, but deliberately alter a single visual variable.

Continuing from yesterday’s post on Reductive Prompting, today I want to show you Transformational Prompting.

How Reductive Prompting Works

Transformational prompting is about intentional variation. You keep the structure, subject, and mood of an image consistent, but deliberately alter a single visual variable. This could be color, texture, lighting, material, time of day, ethnicity, age, emotion, etc.

The magic lies in controlled contrast — showing how one change echoes through an image while everything else holds.

NOTE: this is not just a Midjourney thing. This is a prompting technique applicable with every genAI platform.

Reductive = eliminating & observing
Additive = adding to & observing
*Transformational = switching one thing & observing
Generative = pushing AI to hallucinate

The prompting used to develop these desert images in MJ are based on Transformational Prompting - where a core look is defined, and we modify specific details to change up the location, the action, and the details.

Transformational Prompting is about switching one thing and observing.