Controlling colour: limited palettes, reference images and grading

Colour words in a prompt bleed. Ask for "red dress, blue sky" and you often get a purple wash or a red sky. Here are the methods that actually hold a palette. 1. Fewer colour words, placed with their object "woman in a crimson dress" works better than "crimson, woman, dress". If two colours bleed, weight one, or inpaint the second region separately. 2. Name a palette, not colours Terms like monochrome, muted earth tones, duotone, teal and orange, pastel, sepia set the overall mood more reliably than a list of hues. 3. img2img from a palette block Paint the image as flat colour areas in the palette you want, then img2img at denoise 0.6-0.7. The model keeps your colour masses. 4. Grade afterwards This is what painters and photographers do anyway. In GIMP: Colors > Curves per channel, or Colors > Map for gradient maps. In Krita or Photopea: a gradient map adjustment layer. A gradient map with five colours turns any output into exactly your palette, then lower its opacity to taste. 5. Reference images A character or style reference (IP-Adapter) carries the colours of the reference into the result. Useful when you want "this exact costume colour" across a series. What goes wrong - Oversaturated, glowing colour: CFG too high. Lower it before blaming the palette. - Grey, flat colour: often the VAE. Some checkpoints need a separate VAE file; without it colours wash out. Reproduce it Post the palette (hex values) alongside the image, and which of the methods above you used.