When I started I was just copying from online galleries like Civitai or Leonardo.ai, which gave me noticeable better images than what I have came up with myself before. However, it seemed to me that many of these images may also just have copied prompts without understanding what's really going on with them and I started to experiment for myself.

What I will do right now is to build my images "from ground up" starting with super basic prompts like "a house on a lake" and work from there. First adding descriptions to get the image composition right, then work in the style I'm looking for (photography, digital artwork, cartoon, 3D render, ...). Then I will work in enhancers and see what they change. I found that one has to be patient, only change one thing at a time and always do a couple of images (at least a batch of 8) to see if and what the changes are.

So, I still comb though image galleries for inspiration in prompting, but I will now most of the time just pick one keyword or enhancer and see what it does to my own images.

It is a long process that requires many iterations, but I find it really enjoyable.

I don’t bother with prompt enhancers any more. Stable Diffusion isn’t MidJourney; quantity is far more important than quality. I just prompt for what I want and add negative prompts for things that show up that I don’t want. I’ll use textual inversions like badhandv4 if the details look really bad. If the model isn’t understanding at all then I’ll use ControlNet.