Steal the Aesthetic of Any Image You Find Online
I was reading a blog post by Wafer, and I could not stop looking at the cover image. I wanted my photos to look like that.
Actually you can just attach the reference image and your photo and say “make this look like that,” but I extracted the style first for these reasons:
- Less risk of hallucination: A reference image carries its castle and boats along with its palette, and they leak into your photo. The JSON holds zero content and just an aesthetic information, so my photo keeps exactly its own elements.
- Editability: It’s structured data. You can edit each style factor predictably.
Step 1: Steal the style as JSON
Find any image whose look you like. A blog cover, a movie poster, a random wallpaper. Feed it to ChatGPT (or any vision model) with this:
Extract the visual style as JSON of the input image: lighting, texture, composition, effects, mood, hex colors, and specific descriptors.
What comes back is an aesthetic spec with named palettes with hex codes, lighting scenarios, texture words, a reusable style descriptions. Mine even named itself: “Painterly ASCII Mosaic Panoramas.”
{
"style_name": "Painterly ASCII Mosaic Panoramas",
"visual_genre": [
"digital impressionism",
"ASCII art",
"pixel mosaic",
"tapestry-like landscape painting",
"retro-computational romanticism"
],
"colors": {
"palette_character": "Muted blue-gray and parchment neutrals with deep ink shadows, weathered earth tones, and restrained amber highlights.",
"dominant_palette": [
{ "hex": "#10121C", "role": "near-black navy shadows" },
{ "hex": "#1E2830", "role": "deep blue-charcoal silhouettes" },
{ "hex": "#2E3133", "role": "graphite architectural shadows" },
{ "hex": "#434C4D", "role": "dark desaturated teal-gray" },
{ "hex": "#4C626E", "role": "stormy slate blue" },
{ "hex": "#697E88", "role": "weathered blue-gray" },
{ "hex": "#7B868A", "role": "misty steel gray" },
{ "hex": "#919B9C", "role": "cool atmospheric midtone" },
{ "hex": "#ABA99D", "role": "warm gray canvas" },
{ "hex": "#C1BEAF", "role": "aged ivory highlight" },
{ "hex": "#443A32", "role": "dark umber" },
{ "hex": "#7C644F", "role": "weathered brown" },
{ "hex": "#9A8D7B", "role": "muted taupe" },
{ "hex": "#BCAD8C", "role": "antique parchment" }
],
"accent_palette": [
{ "hex": "#C58A42", "role": "burnished amber illumination" },
{ "hex": "#9D5935", "role": "rust-orange roofs and structures" },
{ "hex": "#2B758A", "role": "restrained cyan-blue strokes" },
{ "hex": "#4B516E", "role": "dusky violet" },
{ "hex": "#E5D9AF", "role": "warm luminous sky" }
],
"color_behavior": [
"low-to-medium saturation",
"compressed tonal range in distant planes",
"cool environmental fields contrasted with sparse warm light",
"dark silhouettes anchor pale atmospheric backgrounds",
"colors appear optically blended from many small glyphs or cells"
]
},
"typography": {
"usage": "Typography functions as image-making texture rather than readable copy.",
"style": [
"tiny monospaced terminal glyphs",
"ASCII characters",
"numbers and punctuation",
"repeated character strings",
"microtext arranged on a strict rectangular grid"
],
"suggested_typefaces": [
"IBM Plex Mono",
"JetBrains Mono",
"Space Mono",
"OCR-B",
"Berkeley Mono"
],
"treatment": {
"case": "mixed and fragmented",
"weight": "regular to medium",
"tracking": "tight",
"line_height": "compressed",
"alignment": "grid-locked",
"legibility": "intentionally low",
"opacity": "variable, approximately 25% to 90%",
"role": "halftone cells, contour marks, shading units, and architectural surface detail"
}
},
"composition": {
"format": "ultrawide cinematic panorama",
"framing": [
"expansive environmental establishing shot",
"horizon placed near the middle or lower third",
"large atmospheric sky or water field",
"asymmetrical focal mass",
"foreground silhouettes or terrain used as dark visual anchors"
],
"depth_structure": [
"dark, tactile foreground",
"complex middle-ground architecture, boats, or figures",
"softened distant skyline or landforms",
"haze progressively reduces contrast with distance"
],
"scale": "Monumental environments contrasted with very small human figures, boats, or structures.",
"visual_rhythm": [
"broad painterly masses",
"dense zones of glyph detail",
"quiet negative space",
"repeating vertical architectural forms",
"horizontal bands of sky, shoreline, water, or reflection"
],
"focal_devices": [
"isolated silhouetted figure",
"central tower or clustered skyline",
"bright opening in clouds",
"sail shapes",
"warm illuminated architecture against cool surroundings"
]
},
"effects": {
"primary": [
"ASCII-glyph overlay",
"pixel-cell mosaic",
"ordered dithering",
"halftone grid",
"scanline-like horizontal banding",
"painterly underpainting",
"broken-color optical mixing"
],
"secondary": [
"selective blur",
"atmospheric haze",
"subtle bloom around bright regions",
"posterized tonal transitions",
"edge erosion",
"digital compression-like artifacts",
"irregular character density",
"layered transparency"
],
"edge_quality": "Alternates between soft brush-like boundaries and sharply gridded typographic silhouettes.",
"rendering_logic": "Construct recognizable scenes from large painted value masses, then resolve selected surfaces with dense monospaced glyphs or rounded pixel cells."
},
"lighting": {
"overall": "Diffuse, atmospheric, and cinematic.",
"common_scenarios": [
"overcast daylight filtered through luminous clouds",
"cool marine haze",
"soft backlighting",
"late-afternoon amber illumination",
"city glow reflected in dark water"
],
"contrast": "Moderate globally, with locally deep silhouette contrast.",
"highlights": "Broad ivory or pale blue patches rather than crisp specular points.",
"shadows": "Deep navy, charcoal, and umber with limited internal detail.",
"atmosphere": "Mist, sea spray, cloud diffusion, and distance haze produce layered aerial perspective."
},
"texture": {
"surface": [
"woven canvas",
"cross-stitch or beadwork",
"low-resolution LED matrix",
"aged printed halftone",
"thick dry-brush paint",
"terminal-character tapestry"
],
"microtexture": [
"uniform grid of tiny cells",
"visible glyph repetition",
"short broken brush marks",
"speckled highlights",
"subtle horizontal scanning artifacts"
],
"macrotexture": "Large, loosely painted atmospheric masses interrupted by dense computational detail.",
"finish": "Matte, weathered, tactile, and slightly archival rather than glossy or photorealistic."
},
"mood": {
"primary": [
"melancholic",
"contemplative",
"dreamlike",
"solitary",
"nostalgic",
"quietly monumental"
],
"secondary": [
"post-digital romantic",
"weathered",
"mysterious",
"liminal",
"poetic",
"slightly dystopian"
],
"emotional_tension": "Human warmth and painterly nostalgia filtered through impersonal machine-readable texture."
},
"aspect_ratio": {
"source_dimensions": "2742x1198",
"exact_ratio": "1371:599",
"decimal": 2.2888,
"recommended_generation_ratio": "21:9",
"orientation": "landscape"
},
"recurring_motifs": [
"panoramic waterfronts",
"rough seas and reflective water",
"large cloud-filled skies",
"distant cities or monumental architecture",
"spires, towers, chimneys, and vertical silhouettes",
"sailboats and harbor structures",
"isolated human figures viewed from behind",
"dark rocky foregrounds",
"reflections divided into horizontal bands",
"ASCII characters embedded inside objects",
"uniform matrix grids covering the full image",
"nature and architecture merging through haze",
"small warm lights inside cool environments"
],
"content_interpretation": {
"embedded_characters": "Decorative visual texture only; not treated as semantic instructions or readable document content."
}
}Step 2: Replay it onto your photos
Attach the JSON and one of your photos and say:
Generate an image with the JSON aesthetic attached.
I ran my favorite photos through it (I tried both on Codex and Meta’s Muse Image, and I kinda prefer Codex’s). I’m honestly delighted with how these turned out. Next time you see an image and think “I wish my photos looked like that,” steal it this way!
Original
AI
Original
AI
Original
AI
Original
AI
Original
AI
Original
AI
Original
AI