PROMPT GUIDE

AI Art Troubleshooting Guide (Look Up Fixes by Symptom)

When something feels "off," the fastest fix starts with naming the symptom. This guide is organized so you can look things up by symptom. Each one is covered in three steps, cause, fix tags and avoiding it with composition, so you can fix today's image right away.

Last updated: 2026-07-10 approx. 3 min read

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Symptom 1: Weird fingers and broken hands

Cause: Hands take up little space but carry a lot of detail, making them the part AI struggles with most. The more complex the hand pose, or the smaller the hands appear, the more likely they are to break.

Fix tags: put bad hands, extra fingers, missing fingers, extra digits, fewer digits in the negative prompt
Avoid with composition: reduce how much hand detail there is at all with hands in pockets, arms behind back, or hidden hands
Giving her something to hold, like holding cup, fixes the finger shape and makes hands less likely to break

Symptom 2: Eyes look wrong (different size or color on each side)

Cause: In compositions where the face is small, or at angled views, there isn't enough resolution for eye detail, so left-right differences appear more easily.

Fix tags: add asymmetrical eyes, bad eyes to the negative prompt. If the colors differ between eyes, put heterochromia in the negative too
Avoid with composition: secure enough face area with portrait or upper body. straight-on is more stable than an extreme angled face
Switching to closed eyes or a wink (one eye closed) is also a practical workaround

Symptom 3: Broken legs and joints (extra limbs, twisting)

Cause: In poses where the body bends, such as sitting, lying down or looking back, AI tends to mix up which joints are in front and which are behind.

Fix tags: put extra limbs, extra legs, extra arms, bad anatomy, bad proportions in the negative prompt
Avoid with composition: limit pose tags to 1-2, and for complex poses use cowboy shot to push everything below the knees out of frame
For lying poses, stating either on back or on stomach stabilizes the body's orientation

Symptom 4: Melting, warped backgrounds

Cause: This tends to happen when there aren't enough background tags and the AI fills the space with "something plausible," or when buildings full of straight lines are drawn from an angle.

Fix tags: break location tags down into specific elements (city -> city street, crosswalk, power lines). detailed background also helps
Avoid with composition: deliberately blur the background with depth of field, and the melting becomes a stylistic choice

Symptom 5: Garbled text and signs

Cause: AI draws text as "text-like patterns," so writing on signs and posters is very likely to come out garbled.

Fix tags: put text, signature, watermark in the negative prompt
Avoid with composition: in places with lots of signs, blur the text away with blurry background, or move to an angle where no text is visible

Symptom 6: The face turns into someone else when upscaling

Cause: If denoise (denoising strength) is too high when upscaling, the image gets redrawn as it's enlarged and the face changes.

Fix: lower denoise to around 0.3-0.4 for an "enlarge more than redraw" setting
Writing the face-related tags (hair color, eyes, expression) in more detail makes it more likely the same face returns even if redrawn
Keep the seed fixed and change only the upscaling settings to compare, which makes the cause easier to isolate

Symptom 7: Dull colors and a flat, sleepy image

Cause: Either overcast or muted-style tags are too strong, or there aren't enough lighting tags, so the image lacks overall contrast between light and dark.

Fix tags: add vibrant colors or high contrast. Putting muted colors, greyscale in the negative prompt is another option
Adding one lighting tag (sunlight, window light, city lights, etc.) creates contrast and tightens up the image

Negative prompt cheat sheet for fixing errors

Negative tags by symptom

Tag	Meaning	Note
`bad hands`	Fixes broken hands	First choice for hand issues
`extra fingers`	Prevents too many fingers	Pair with missing fingers
`asymmetrical eyes`	Prevents uneven eyes
`extra limbs`	Prevents extra arms and legs
`extra legs`	Prevents extra legs	Especially in sitting poses
`bad anatomy`	Prevents overall body errors	Broad insurance
`bad proportions`	Prevents broken body proportions
`text`	Prevents random text	Remove it when you want text
`blurry`	Prevents blurriness

Rinka's tips

The basic approach to negatives is "add the name of the accident that happened." Don't throw everything in from the start
For errors tags can't fix, the shortest route is to change the composition so the error-prone parts aren't shown
For a pre-posting error check, loading the image into AI Critique Lite makes it easier to notice things you missed

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Adding negative tags doesn't fix it.

There's a limit to what tags alone can fix. Realistically, try in this order: change the pose or angle to reduce detail in the problem area, generate several images and pick one, then regenerate just the affected part.

Is there a way to get an error-free image in one shot?

You can't bring the odds to zero. The standard approach is a combination: lower the error rate (a solid negative prompt, simple poses, enough face area) and generate multiple images to pick from.

Which symptom should I fix first?

Fix them in the order viewers' eyes go: face (eyes), then hands, then body, then background. If the face and hands look right, small glitches in the background are much less noticeable.