Text-to-image prompting

Hello all, I’m hoping people can share their tips and tricks with regards to text-to-image prompting, as I am hitting a few hurdles that seem too silly to be a problem, yet they are.

My most basic issue at the moment, is that I’ve been trying to make some Christmas artwork, where the composition in my head is that there’d be a full view of the tree, with packages and a pony at the bottom of it. Sounds easy and very doable.

The biggest issue I’m having, is that no matter what I prompt, it always crops the tree and only shows the very bottom of it.. in the rare instance it gives me a seed with a full tree, it’s pot-plant sized.

I have tried to put christmas tree at the start of the prompt, majestic christmas tree, full view of christmas tree, big christmas tree etc, as well as putting things like zoomed in, cropped etc in negative prompt. I’ve also tried multiple aspect ratios. (1:1, 16:9 and 9:16)

Is there something obvious with my prompting that I’m doing incorrectly? Do I really need to get a LoRA for such a common thing?

Model: ponyDiffusionV6XL_v6StartWithThisOne

At this point, I would just put the tree in manually and img2img/inpaint.

Remember trying those two features a year or two ago, and not making it work. Guess I’ll just have to try again.

Another question though, when prompting do you guys use natural language describing what you envision, or comma,separated,keywords,like,this?
A mixture? Varies by model?
And to “save on tokens”, do you use more concise but lesser used words, or favor using more tokens for more words just in case the model wouldn’t understand the lesser used ones?

It does seem rather temperamental. I generally find it helps if you mention things the view needs to be bigger to accommodate. I had some success with this prompt on pony v6:
score_8, score_8_up, score_7_up, score_6_up, score_5_up, score_4_up,
source_pony, rating_safe,
cute Pegasus Derpy sleeping under a tree, Christmas, presents, ornaments, star on top of tree, window, ceiling,
god rays,

“star on top of tree” and “ceiling” helped clue it in that it should be a further away shot.

(Generally, the format I use for pony v6 models is score tags, source, rating, a general description, then tags.)