Search those three problems as separate keywords and you get three tutorials. They are the same failure.

A photoreal model is trained to finish a pretty picture. When the prompt is vague about contact, type, or skin, it finishes with a default: extra knuckles, soup letters, poreless glaze. The fix is not a longer adjective list. It is naming the thing the default is allowed to invent.

This is a guide, not a shop window. The frames below illustrate the default and the fix. They are not prompts waiting on another page. There is no “best hands” or “best skin” row to click. Steal the rule, then write your own sentence.

One default, three symptoms

Hands fail at contact. The model knows “hand” as a symbol. It does not know that a cup has a rim, a pocket has a seam, or that five fingers share one palm. Write “elegant hands” and leave the grip empty, and it will decorate.

On-image text fails at symbols. Letters are not fabric. The model invents a brand-shaped smear because that is cheaper than spelling. “A logo on the hoodie” is a request to draw type, not a photograph of cotton.

Plastic skin fails at beauty mode. “Flawless”, “airbrushed”, “perfect complexion”, and a fifty-word face paragraph all push the same slider: remove pores, melt the philtrum, glaze the forehead.

If a prompt spends its budget on mood words and never spends it on a contact point, a no-lettering line, or raw skin, you can get all three faults in one frame.

Hands: write the grip, not the adjective

Do not write “beautiful hands” or “detailed fingers”. Write what the hand is doing and what it touches.

A usable hand line names:

• which hand
• the object (rim, rail, lapel, table edge)
• how the weight sits (holding, leaning, pocketed)
• that the palm is one piece

Then stop. A paragraph about knuckles is how you get a sixth finger — the model starts inventing anatomy to fill the sentence.

The broken version is a standing beauty portrait, arms at the sides, “intricate hands visible”. There is no job for the hands, so the model improvises.

The working version puts a real job in the frame: seated, one hand on a blank cup, the other on the table edge, nothing cute about the fingers.

When you reuse that idea, change the object, not the adjective. Rail instead of cup. Pocket instead of table. If the contact point moves, the hand can survive. If you only swap “cafe” for “street”, the grip is still the thing that works.

Lettering: do not ask the model to typeset

There is no reliable “good AI typography” worth chasing in the prompt box. If you need a word on a window, a cover, or a jersey, you add it later — or you pick a frame that never needed the word.

What breaks the shot:

• brand names on clothing
• readable neon
• a headline you could quote
• “the sign says …”

The frame below is the bug: type that is trying to be a brand and failing. It is here so you can recognise soup letters. It is not a prompt to copy.

What keeps the shot photographic:

• an awning with lettering out of focus / illegible
• a book held closed, spine turned away
• a mug with no print
• this Avoid fragment: no readable text, no logos, no signage

That last line is shorter than a paragraph begging for correct spelling, and it is the one that works.

Plastic skin: stop selling beauty to the model

“Photoreal” does not mean “magazine retouch”. If you write both, retouch wins.

Cut these, even when they sound professional: flawless, porcelain, doll-like, airbrushed, perfect skin, dewy glaze, beauty dish on the face, 8k skin.

The glazed close-up below is what those words buy. Again: a demonstration of the default, not a look to chase.

Keep these once, in the body, not as a chant: raw unretouched photograph, visible pores, micro-imperfections, natural skin texture, film grain.

The identity clause already forbids a new face. Plastic skin is what happens when you then ask the model to polish the face it inherited.

The last frame is a close three-quarter in hard window light. The light is allowed to be unkind. That is the point.

If a regenerate comes back waxy, do not add more skin words. Remove a beauty word you left in, or stop the face paragraph at the identity clause and the light.

What to steal from the frames

The photographs share a short rule set. Copy the rules, not a wardrobe, and not a URL:

1. One contact job or one hard light — not a mood essay.
2. Identity inherited once. Never described.
3. Hair is arrangement, not a colour or a length.
4. The Avoid tail names the failure: extra fingers, plastic skin, readable text, logos — except when you are deliberately showing the failure, as in the lettering and glaze frames above.

Write the next picture yourself. The guide is the why. The library, when you want a finished prompt, is a different page.