Illustrious lighting prompts, tested

Twenty lighting tags on one portrait, from backlighting and rim lighting to neon lights and silhouette. Same character, same two seeds.

The test

Every tile below uses the same prompt with one tag swapped in, on the same two seeds (1001 and 1002), on SirenRender’s free anime tile: WAI-Illustrious-SDXL v17 with the DMD2 LoRA, 8 steps, CFG 1, 832×1216. {TAG} marks where each tag goes:

general, solo, mature female, long black hair, amber eyes, white shirt, black jacket, upper body, outdoors, city, {TAG}

What we found

On WAI v17, lighting works through time of day and light sources, not through adjectives. sunlight, dappled sunlight, sunset, night, moonlight and neon lights changed the picture on both seeds. The popular quality words did much less: cinematic lighting, volumetric lighting, dramatic lighting and soft lighting mostly just moved the scene toward evening, and silhouette and dark did nothing at all. If you want a mood, name the light source and the time. In this test, night or neon lights did more than any of the lighting adjectives.