Prompting a believable person
Believability lives in specifics and imperfections. Describe the person like a casting note — 'woman in her late 50s, silver-streaked hair, laugh lines, warm direct gaze' — then add the flaws real faces have: freckles, slight asymmetry, flyaway hair, skin texture. Perfectly smooth, perfectly symmetric faces are what trip the 'AI-generated' alarm in a viewer's head.
Then light them like a photographer. '85mm lens, shallow depth of field, soft window light, natural skin texture' does more for realism than any quality adjective, because photoreal models treat camera and lighting language as physical instructions.
Beyond the headshot
Full-body and environmental shots follow the same grammar with more clauses: pose and action ('mid-stride, glancing at her phone'), wardrobe described concretely ('oversized camel coat, white sneakers'), and a setting with real light ('crossing a rain-wet street at dusk, storefront glow'). Candid action reads more human than posed symmetry.
Keep principal subjects few. One or two described people render reliably; crowds are best treated as background texture ('blurred commuters behind her') rather than a list of individuals. If you need a specific pair, give each person one distinguishing clause and let the rest stay generic.
The same person, every time
One-off faces are easy; a recurring person is the real feature. Generate a small set of your person — 3 to 20 images across angles and expressions, reusing the same description — then train a character from them. From that point the model knows this person, and you can place them in new scenes, outfits, and lighting without their face drifting between generations.
That unlocks serial use cases: the same synthetic spokesperson across a whole campaign, the same persona across every screen of a product mockup, the same character across a photo story. For fast iteration on the initial design, Z-Image renders quick photoreal drafts at 2 credits before you commit the set to Seedream v4.5.
Synthetic people, real rules
The advantages are legal as much as creative: a person who doesn't exist has no likeness rights to clear, no release to sign, no reshoot fee. For persona cards, demo data, editorial illustration, and campaign concepts, that removes the slowest step in the pipeline.
Two lines not to cross: don't generate real, identifiable individuals without their consent, and don't present synthetic people as real ones where authenticity is the point — a generated face posing as a genuine customer in a testimonial is deception, not design. Use synthetic humans where their being synthetic is fine.