Flat lay of baking ingredients on rustic wood

A tool-agnostic prompt pattern for overhead flat lay food photography, arranging baking ingredients with visual hierarchy and natural color palette.

Overhead flat lay of baking ingredients including flour, eggs, honey, and chocolate on rustic wood

Prompt

An overhead flat lay photograph of baking ingredients arranged on a weathered
oak cutting board placed on a flour-dusted dark wood table. Center composition
anchored by a white ceramic mixing bowl half-filled with sifted flour. Surrounding
the bowl in a loose organic arrangement: three brown eggs in a small linen-lined
basket, a glass jar of golden honey with a wooden dipper resting across the top,
a stick of butter partially unwrapped from its parchment, a small pinch bowl of
flaky sea salt, a vanilla bean split lengthwise showing seeds, and a scattered
handful of dark chocolate chips. Soft diffused window light from the upper left
creating gentle shadows falling to the lower right. Muted earth-tone color palette
with pops of gold from the honey. Shot directly overhead, perfectly flat
perspective, food photography editorial style.
Negative prompt 
tilted angle, perspective distortion, cluttered, neon colors, artificial lighting, text, watermark

Aspect ratio: 1:1

Tool-agnostic: adapt to your generator.

Why this works

Flat lay photography is deceptively difficult to prompt well because it requires the generator to understand spatial arrangement from a single viewpoint. This prompt succeeds through three key strategies.

Anchor-and-orbit composition — The white mixing bowl is declared as the center anchor, with all other items described as “surrounding” it. This gives the generator a compositional hierarchy: one dominant element with supporting items arranged around it. Without an anchor, flat lays tend to produce chaotic scatters or rigid grids.

Specific item descriptions with material cues — Every ingredient includes a material or container detail: “linen-lined basket,” “glass jar,” “parchment” wrapper, “pinch bowl.” These material cues serve double duty — they tell the generator what to render and they add visual texture variety to the composition.

Shadow direction as spatial glue — “Soft diffused window light from the upper left creating gentle shadows falling to the lower right” establishes a single consistent light direction. In flat lays, shadow consistency is what makes the scene feel like a real photograph rather than a collage of objects. Specifying both the light source position and shadow fall direction gives the generator two anchors to maintain coherence.

Color palette control — “Muted earth-tone color palette with pops of gold from the honey” constrains the generator’s color choices while allowing natural variation. The gold highlight creates visual interest without breaking the rustic aesthetic.

What to change if it fails

  • Items overlapping messily? Add “each ingredient clearly separated with breathing room between items, no overlapping.”
  • Not truly overhead? Strengthen with “perfectly top-down camera angle, zero perspective, completely flat plane, bird’s eye view.”
  • Too cluttered with too many items? Reduce to 4-5 key ingredients and add “minimalist arrangement with generous negative space.”
  • Shadows inconsistent? Remove shadow direction and simplify to “even, diffused, shadowless lighting from directly above.”
  • Wood surface not visible enough? Change to “ingredients sparsely arranged, large areas of the wood table surface visible between items.”

Browse related

flat lay

ai-generated demonstration · created by imageprompt.com · takedown requests

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