How much of the picture should the ember be?

A tenth at most. The rock has to dominate, or the heat stops reading as heat and the palette turns into a generic dark orange scene.

Why does my rock look like mud?

The greys came back warm. Say the ash grey is cold and let only the stone brown carry warmth, so the two greys can be told apart.

How do I prompt a volcanic palette?

Name black basalt, cold ash grey and warm stone brown, add one small ember red and one small sulphur yellow, and say almost the whole picture stays dark.

Volcanic Basalt

lava field palette
black rock and ember
ash colours

Four steps of black rock and ash, lit by one ember red and one sulphur gold.

Use this palette

Opens an image model with the palette in the prompt. The same words work on a video model.

#0E0D0C
#2B2724
#4A423C
#7A6B60
#C4462A
#E4A13A

Volcanic Basalt used in one room — The same room, drawn to this palette. One colour carries the frame, one takes a third, one is the accent.

What it is for

Almost nothing else in this catalogue puts a saturated colour inside a near black field. The contrast is extreme and it reads as heat, danger and weight at the same time.

It is also a true observation. A lava field is mostly black with almost no colour in it, and the little colour there is happens to be the hottest part of the spectrum.

How it works

Build four dark steps first: black, cold ash, warm stone, pale dust. That ladder is the ground everything sits on.

Add exactly two hot notes, an ember red and a sulphur yellow. Two is enough for the eye to read a temperature.

Keep the hot notes small and low in the frame. Heat rises from under things, and putting the red at the top turns it into a sunset.

When to use it

Use it for weight, heat, industry and risk: tools, forges, a metal record sleeve, a rugged product, a title card.

Leave it alone for food and for anything gentle. The palette is a warning by construction.

Told apart from its neighbours

Neutral plus one accent is the rule underneath. This palette uses two accents and fixes them both as heat, which is a narrower and more specific thing.

Concrete and Moss shares the greys but its one colour is cool and organic. Swap the ember for the moss and the whole meaning changes.

Where it was used

Icelandic landscape photography made this set familiar, and forge and tool brands took it because it says the product has been through fire.

Icelandic landscape photography
forge and blacksmith brands
heavy equipment catalogues

The prompt

Run it as it stands, or drop the colour clause into a prompt you already have. It works in an image prompt and in a video prompt.

<subject>, volcanic palette of black basalt, cold ash grey and warm stone brown, with one ember red and one sulphur yellow as the only saturated colours, almost the whole picture dark, the two hot notes small

Run it

What goes wrong

A photograph of a volcano arrives instead of the subject. The palette is a colour set, so name your subject at the front and keep it there.

The ember spreads until the picture glows all over. Say the two hot notes are small and everything else is dark rock.

The greys come back warm and the rock looks like mud. Say the ash grey is cold and only the stone brown is warm.

Leave out

blue, green, a bright sky, large areas of colour

Watch for

The hot notes have to stay small. Give them more than a tenth of the picture and the rock stops reading as rock.

Questions

Black basalt, cold ash grey and warm stone brown, with one ember red and one sulphur yellow as the only saturated colours. The picture stays mostly dark.