MiniMax H3 Image prompts for photos that look like someone took them

MiniMax H3 Image landed on PixelDojo on November 10, 2026. The changelog pitch is "photos that look taken," and that is what the prompting guide is built around.

This is MiniMax H3 Image, the image model. It is not MiniMax H3 video model, which is the video model. It is also not P-H3-Image photoreal model, which is a separate photoreal image model on PixelDojo. The names get mixed up. On the pricing page, the unlimited Relax line labeled "H3 Image" (1K, 0 credits) links to P-H3-Image, not to MiniMax H3 Image. MiniMax H3 Image uses 1.5 credits per image at 2K and 4 credits per image at 4K.

The longer, copy-ready version of this, with the 4K examples, is the MiniMax H3 Image prompting guide. This post is a shorter look at how to write those prompts.

MiniMax H3 Image prompt guide and same-prompt tests, from All Your Tech.

How to prompt MiniMax for photos that look taken

It follows a long, detailed prompt closely. A short line works, but a full paragraph is closer to the picture in your head. Write it like a brief for a photographer: what kind of image it is, who or what is in it, where each thing sits, and where the light comes from.

Quoted text comes out as typed if you put the words in quotes and name the spot. Text you only describe, like "a short line under each step," turns into made-up lettering.

It also edits a photo, or combines up to 8 images, and it can render up to 16 megapixels. A square image at 4K is 4096 by 4096, which is useful if you are going to crop or print a label.

On PixelDojo, a 2K image is 1.5 credits and a 4K image is 4 credits. Those are the public prices on the changelog and the guide.

MiniMax prompt habits that work

Start with what the image is. "A candid photograph," "a frame from a quiet 1990s independent film," "a risograph-printed poster," "a hand-painted gouache illustration." That first line does more than a list of style tags at the end.

Give each object its own sentence and its own place. Top left corner, bottom right, to the left of the blueprint, in that order from top to bottom. The guide's overhead desk shot works this way: a brass compass pinning the top left of a blueprint, a white coffee cup on the bottom right, a ruler on the diagonal, a notebook with a red elastic band to the left, and three pencils (yellow, blue, green) to the right. Each one landed where the prompt put it.

The guide's overhead desk shot. Each object landed where the prompt put it.

Quote every line of type. The guide's two-color bookshop poster quotes the shop name at the top, the line under it, and the address line at the bottom, then ends with "No other text." The print method ("risograph") and the two inks (teal and coral) set the look.

The two-color bookshop poster from the guide, with every line of type quoted in the prompt.

For a photo edit, say the change, then list what must stay. One of the guide examples takes a fishmonger portrait and asks for a yellow apron and light snow through the skylight, while keeping his face, the fish, the scale, and the counter the same. Leave the aspect ratio on Auto if you want to keep the shape of the original photo.

The same fishmonger after the edit: yellow apron and snow through the skylight, face and counter unchanged.

A MiniMax prompt you can copy

This is the candid portrait from the guide. It is a good template for any unposed person in a real place:

A candid photograph of a fishmonger in his fifties with a salt-and-pepper beard and a navy rubber apron, laughing as he weighs a silver sea bass on a brass scale. Crushed ice and small handwritten price tags fill the counter in front of him. Cold morning light falls from a market skylight above. Shot on a 50mm lens, natural skin texture, slight motion in his hands.

The candid fishmonger portrait from the MiniMax H3 Image prompting guide.

Two small choices keep it from feeling posed: "candid photograph" plus one action in progress, and a named light source plus a lens so it stays a photo instead of drifting into illustration.

If you want handwriting instead of a poster, treat it the same way as print. Quote each line, and say the pen and the paper. A recipe card in blue ballpoint on cream stock with a thin red border is much more likely to look like a card someone actually wrote than "a handwritten note" with no other detail.

When I would pick something other than MiniMax

Seedream 5.5 is on PixelDojo too, and I would keep both around. MiniMax H3 Image is the one I would reach for when I want a frame that feels photographed, or when I have a long, fussy brief with a lot of object placement. If I am trying to cut a sticker or a logo as a see-through PNG, I would go elsewhere. Different jobs.

I am not picking a winner against Nano Banana, GPT Image, or Seedream in this post. If you want same-prompt grids, we published those as separate guides. Start with the MiniMax Image prompting guide if you just want prompts that already have 4K frames next to them.

And if you came here looking for the video model, that is MiniMax H3 video model. If you want the other photoreal image model on PixelDojo, that is P-H3-Image photoreal model.