This café flatlay prompt, shared by @azed_ai on X on October 5, 2026, is a fill-in template for top-down food photos: you swap in a dish, a drink and two palette colors, and the rest of the sentence fixes the camera angle, the light and the styling. It suits menu shots, café posts and recipe cards.
On this page
The prompt, as shared on X
The post, shared by @azed_ai on X under the title “Fresh Café Flatlay”, gives the prompt in full:
Photorealistic top-down shot of [food] with [drink] in a stylish café setting, cheerful fresh atmosphere, [color1] and [color2] palette, elegant food styling, natural textures, soft daylight, subtle shadows, premium editorial food photography, ARRI Alexa look, crisp details, 8K realism
The author closes with “Try it and share yours” and posts four example images. Open the post to see them; we link the original rather than copy them. The post does not say which image model made the examples.
Why the slots work
The template keeps everything that makes a flatlay look like a flatlay and leaves only four things open:
| Fixed in the prompt | Open slot |
|---|---|
| Top-down angle, café setting | [food] |
| Soft daylight, subtle shadows | [drink] |
| Editorial food-photo styling, natural textures | [color1] and [color2] |
That split follows what the vendors advise. Google’s guide to prompting its image model says “think like a photographer” and name the shot, the light and the textures. OpenAI’s image prompting guide recommends the word “photorealistic”, which this prompt opens with.
The two palette colors do most of the brand work. “Sage and cream” and “terracotta and white” give two very different tables from the same sentence, without rewriting the styling.
How to adapt it
- Be specific in the slots. “A pistachio croissant cut in half” gives the model more to draw than “pastry”. The same goes for the drink: “an iced oat latte in a tall glass”.
- Set the frame. Google suggests stating the aspect ratio in the prompt; add “4:5 vertical” for a feed post or “16:9” for a banner.
- Treat camera names as mood words. OpenAI’s guide says detailed camera specs “may be interpreted loosely”, so “ARRI Alexa look” and “8K realism” set a tone rather than a technical result.
- Use your own dish. Upload a photo of the real plate and ask to restage it, keeping the food unchanged. OpenAI’s edit advice is to write “change only X” and “keep everything else the same”.
Our photo prompts guide covers the wider vocabulary of shots, lenses and light, and the Gemini AI photoshoot prompt guide has product templates.
