What kind of source
How far do colour and quality of light decide the time and place?
Direction decides the shape of the shadows; the kind of source decides colour and mood. Moonlight and a fluorescent tube put the same face in different stories.
Lighting is the strongest of the three categories measured here: 40 of 58 candidates moved well past the noise floor.
Every cut below shares one seed, one base prompt and one sampler setting, and differs only by the tag marked in amber.
What each cut shows
moonlight- Cold, blue, low. Shadows soften and overall exposure drops — the time of day changes with it.
fluorescent lighting- Ordinary indoor light on a warm cream wall. There is no green cast, and with a window and a framed picture the room reads as a home rather than an office.
stark white light- Hard neutral white. Contrast climbs and colour drains — clinical, or advertising-like.
neon glow- The background becomes a blue-grey interior with glowing panels, but no coloured light lands on the subject; the neon colours show up only as small lights inside framed pictures.
How these were made
Shared prompt
masterpiece, best quality, amazing quality, very awa, 1girl, solo, mature female, adult woman, short black hair, brown eyes, white blouse, upper body, plain interior wall, <tag slot>
Tap a tag to carry it over to the builder
Negative prompt
school uniform, pleated skirt, blazer, serafuku, child, loli, teenage, bad quality, worst quality, worst detail, sketch, censor, jpeg artifacts, watermark, signature, text, extra limbs, bad hands, bad anatomy
Model
rinFlanimeIllustrious_v30 · euler_ancestral/normal · steps 28 · CFG 5 · 896×1152 · seed 777002
Takeaway
Source tags drag place and time along with colour. If the setting is already fixed in your prompt, expect a conflict and adjust both together.
How far this result reaches
A tag like moonlight fights a background condition like daytime head-on. Keep one.
Measured on a single Stable Diffusion family checkpoint. The same tags can behave differently on NovelAI, Midjourney or another checkpoint. This is a reference point, not a verdict.