Key takeaways
- Licensing and indemnification matter more than sample galleries for business use.
- A reliable prompt names subject, action, setting, style, lighting, lens and aspect ratio.
- Text inside images is still the clearest quality difference between models.
- Reference images and seeds are how you get consistency across a campaign.
- Budget for iteration: a usable final asset typically takes five to twenty generations.
Choose on licensing before aesthetics
For commercial work the first question is not which model looks best, it is what rights you get and whether the vendor indemnifies you. Adobe Firefly is trained on licensed and public-domain material and comes with enterprise indemnification, which is why regulated industries default to it.
Most other services grant broad commercial use of your outputs on paid tiers, but without indemnification. Read the terms for your specific plan rather than relying on a summary, because free tiers frequently differ.
How the main options differ
Midjourney remains the strongest on aesthetic coherence, lighting and mood, and is the usual choice for concept art, editorial illustration and moodboards.
Ideogram is the reliable pick when the image must contain readable words, such as posters, packaging mockups and social graphics with headlines.
Stable Diffusion and its ecosystem give the most control through fine-tuning, ControlNet and local deployment, which matters when the images cannot leave your infrastructure.
DALL-E inside ChatGPT is the most convenient for iterative conversational editing, and Firefly integrates directly into Photoshop workflows.
A prompt formula that transfers between models
Write prompts in this order: subject, action, setting, style, lighting, camera or lens, colour palette, aspect ratio. Each element removes a category of randomness.
Describe what you want rather than what you do not. Negative instructions are handled inconsistently, and most models respond better to a positive description of the desired result.
Specify the medium explicitly. 'Editorial photograph', 'flat vector illustration' and 'oil painting' produce far more predictable output than an unqualified description.
Consistency across a set
Lock a seed where the tool exposes one, reuse the same style clause verbatim across the set, and supply a reference image for character or product continuity.
Build a short style guide string for your brand, for example a palette, a lighting description and a lens, then append it to every prompt. Consistency comes from repetition, not from cleverness.
For product imagery, generate the scene and composite the real product in afterwards. Models still invent details on logos and hardware.
Editing, upscaling and finishing
Treat generation as the first eighty percent. Inpainting fixes hands, faces and stray objects, upscalers add print-ready resolution, and a short pass in an editor fixes colour and crop.
Keep the source prompt and seed in the filename or an accompanying note. Re-creating a variant three months later is otherwise impossible.
Disclosure, provenance and ethics
Content credentials embedded by tools such as Firefly travel with the file and are increasingly expected by publishers. Keep them rather than stripping them on export.
Do not generate images in the style of a living artist for commercial use, and do not generate identifiable people without consent. Both are legal risks as well as reputational ones.
Cost planning
Most services price by generation credits or by a monthly plan with fast-hours. A realistic assumption is five to twenty generations per usable asset, higher for anything containing text.
For high volume, self-hosted Stable Diffusion on a rented GPU becomes cheaper past roughly a few thousand images per month, at the cost of engineering time.
References
- [1] Adobe Firefly commercial use and indemnification terms — adobe.com
- [2] Content Authenticity Initiative content credentials specification — contentauthenticity.org
Frequently asked questions
Which AI image generator is best for text in images?
Ideogram is the most reliable for readable text, with recent Midjourney and DALL-E versions close behind for short headlines.
Can I use AI images commercially?
On paid tiers of the major services, yes. Only Adobe Firefly currently pairs that with enterprise indemnification, which matters for regulated or high-exposure use.
Is Stable Diffusion still worth it?
Yes when you need control, fine-tuning on your own assets, or local generation for privacy. It costs more engineering effort than hosted tools.
How do I keep a character consistent?
Reuse a seed, a verbatim style clause and a reference image, and generate variations from an approved base rather than starting fresh each time.