Tynion v2: See What Every Prompt Term Looks Likeeric

If you have ever built a prompt for Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or any other text-to-image model, you have probably typed a term you only half understood. Golden Hour sounds nice — but is it a lighting style or a time of day? What exactly does Rule of Thirds do to a picture? And what on earth is Contrapposto?

Tynion, our free text-to-image prompt helper, was built to take the guesswork out of assembling prompts: click the terms you want, copy the finished prompt. But until now it had the same flaw as every prompt cheat-sheet on the internet — it gave you the words without showing you the pictures.

Tynion v2 fixes that.

Every Term Now Explains Itself

Hover over any term in Tynion (or tap the ⓘ on mobile) and a card pops up with two things:

1. A plain-English definition — written for someone who has never heard the term, covering what the viewer sees and when to use it.
2. A real example image — generated specifically to demonstrate that one term and nothing else.

There are nearly 1,000 terms in the new vocabulary, and every single one has a definition. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Lighting, Demonstrated

The trick that makes the example images useful is consistency: within a group, every image uses the same neutral base subject — a person in plain casual clothing against a plain background — so the only thing that changes between images is the term itself.

Studio Lighting: controlled artificial light from softboxes, shaped to flatter the subject. Clean, polished, professional.

Cinematic Lighting: the same kind of subject, completely different mood — directional, warm, with deep shadow falloff.

Golden Hour: the hour after sunrise or before sunset. Warm, soft, low-angle light and long gentle shadows.

Rembrandt Lighting: look closely at the shadowed cheek — that small triangle of light is the whole technique, borrowed from the painter himself.

Once you have seen these four side by side, you will never confuse them in a prompt again.

Composition: So That Is the Golden Ratio

Composition terms are the ones people bluff the most. Tynion v2 adds a whole Composition group — Rule of Thirds, Golden Ratio, Golden Spiral, Leading Lines, Negative Space, Frame Within a Frame, and more — each with an example image built to make the technique obvious.

Golden Ratio: the subject sits slightly off-centre on the classical ~1:1.618 proportion. Balanced and harmonious without feeling rigidly centred.

Rule of Thirds: the frame divided into a 3×3 grid, with the key elements sitting on the lines. The simplest cure for dead-centre composition.

Poses, Finally With Pictures

v2 also adds a proper Pose & Posture group — 36 poses from classical to dynamic. This was the most requested gap in v1: pose names are vivid to artists and meaningless to everyone else.

Contrapposto: weight on one leg so the hips and shoulders tilt in opposite directions — the relaxed S-curve that classical sculptors loved.

Power Stance: feet planted wide, shoulders squared to the camera. Instant confidence, popular in hero and fashion shots.

What Else Is New in v2

The visual glossary is the headline, but the whole app was rebuilt around it:

• A much bigger vocabulary — from ~300 terms to nearly 1,000, including new groups for Focus & Lens (Bokeh, 85mm Portrait Lens, Anamorphic), Color & Palette (Teal and Orange, Pastel, Sepia), and Film & Medium (Kodak Portra 400, Polaroid, CineStill 800T).
• A data cleanup — Golden Hour, Bokeh, and Depth of Field were misfiled as "camera angles" in v1 (guilty as charged). The camera groups are now properly split into Shot Framing, Camera Angle, and View Direction.
• An editable final prompt — the assembled prompt is now a real text box you can tweak by hand before copying.
• 🎲 Inspire Me — one click picks a coherent random combination across subject, lighting, composition, framing, and style. Great for breaking a blank-page moment.

How the Example Images Were Made

A small confession of dogfooding: every example image was generated by the same kind of pipeline Tynion helps you build prompts for. A script walks the glossary, builds a demonstration prompt per term — fixed base subject, one variable — and feeds it to an image model (Gemini's Imagen, in this batch). The exact prompt used for every image is saved right next to it, so if you want to know how the Rembrandt Lighting demo was made, the recipe is a click away.

Generating nearly a thousand demonstration images taught us a few things about rate limits and retry logic — but that is a story for another post.

Try It

Tynion is free and runs entirely in your browser — no signup, nothing stored: tyolab.com/tynion

Hover around. The glossary is the kind of thing that is hard to stop playing with once you start — and if you spot a term that deserves a better explanation (or a missing term entirely), the feedback link at the bottom of the page goes straight to us.