Describing the light and the lens gets further than naming a style

Style words are a compressed guess

A style name is a request for a bundle of properties that the tool has associated with that name, assembled from however that word was used in its source captions. Two tools will have learned different bundles. The same tool after an update may have a different one. Nothing about the term guarantees which properties come with it.

That is why style vocabulary transfers so badly. A prompt that produced something specific in one place produces something adjacent but wrong in another, and the usual response is to add more style words, which compounds the imprecision by averaging several uncertain bundles together.

The properties underneath, though, are stable everywhere, because they are facts about how pictures look rather than labels applied to them.

What the bundles are actually made of

For photographic looks, most of the difference is light and optics. Direction and hardness of the light source, whether shadows are deep or open, the colour temperature, how much of the depth is in focus, and how much the perspective is compressed. Six or seven decisions, all describable in ordinary words, and between them they account for most of what people mean by a photographic style.

For illustration, the equivalents are the mark, the palette and the flatness. Whether edges are drawn or implied, whether the palette is restricted and to what, whether there is visible texture from a physical process, and whether the image is built from flat areas or from modelling. Again a small set of decisions with large consequences.

Ask for those directly and you get a controllable image. Ask for a style name and you get whatever the label happened to attach to, which may be right and cannot be steered when it is not.

Colour is the third axis and the one most often left to chance. A restricted palette is among the strongest signals of deliberate style, and it is easy to state: two dominant colours and a neutral, or a range described by temperature, or the muted greens and browns of a particular printing process. Unstated, the default drifts towards saturated and generically pleasant.

Process implies more than a name does

One of the most efficient specifications is the physical process the image would have been made by, since a process brings its own constraints. A cyanotype has a palette. A screen print has a limited number of separations and visible registration. A photograph on colour negative film has particular highlight behaviour that no adjective conveys as economically.

This works because a process is a real thing with consistent consequences, well represented and consistently captioned. It is the same reasoning that makes naming a medium more effective than naming a mood: you are giving the tool a constraint that determines many properties rather than an impression to interpret.

It also stays put across tools far better than aesthetic labels, which is worth something to anyone who does not want to relearn their vocabulary every time they change what they are using.

Naming living artists is a separate question

Invoking a named living artist or a small studio to reproduce their look is technically effective in many tools and is contested for reasons that have not been settled. Some jurisdictions and platforms treat it as ordinary influence, others as appropriation of something the artist built, and litigation and policy in this area are actively moving.

There is a practical argument alongside the ethical one. A name is the least reliable kind of style instruction, since it depends entirely on how much of that artist appeared in the source material and how their work was described. Deriving the properties you actually wanted and asking for those gets a more controllable result.

Historical work and long-established movements sit differently, and most people draw the line there. It is worth deciding where you stand before a client asks, rather than in the middle of a job.

Build a vocabulary you have tested

The practical output of all this is a short personal list: the four or five lighting descriptions you use, the two or three lens characteristics, the handful of processes. Tested, in that you have seen what each does, and written down somewhere you can find them.

Such a list is worth more than any collection of prompts copied from elsewhere, because it composes. You can combine tested elements for a subject you have never shot before and predict roughly what will come back, which is not true of an inherited block of keywords.

It also fails gracefully. When a tool changes or you move to another one, a vocabulary of physical properties mostly still applies, whereas a vocabulary of style labels has to be rebuilt from scratch.