When commissioned work goes bad, it's usually the wrong checkpoint, not a bad prompt

The Market / 集市
1

Running a team doing commercial output, faces turn to mush, style doesn’t match between shots — this kind of screwup, we now troubleshoot in the order below, and it’s solved at step one most of the time.

  1. Switch the checkpoint first, don’t touch the prompt. A lot of people’s first instinct is to rewrite the prompt, fiddle with it forever and it does nothing, because the root cause is actually the model. Keep the exact same prompt, swap in the right checkpoint, and it’s fixed instantly.
  2. Default checkpoint: SDXL. Stable output, friendly for beginners too — people on the team who aren’t familiar with this stuff basically don’t screw up with it, easiest for delivery.
  3. For pure photorealism jobs, switch to one of the realism-leaning checkpoints. Skin and lighting are noticeably more real.

Picking the right model really should come before tweaking the prompt — get the order backwards and you’re putting the cart before the horse.

What checkpoints do you all keep on rotation for commissioned work?

3 Likes
2

I’ve hit the opposite — checkpoint was fine, it was the LoRA weight cranked too high that ate the face

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mark

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Sometimes clients complain photorealistic models look too real, say it looks like an ID photo