How to fix mushy, misspelt text in AI images

Work out which problem you have

Look at the text at full size. If big headline letters are clean but small text is smudged, that's the squeeze: the letters were too small to survive being shrunk eight times. If even large letters are misspelt or invented, that's the model: it doesn't know how to spell what you asked for.

A quick sum shows why size matters. A 1024-pixel-wide image becomes a 128-wide grid in Stable Diffusion's latent space. A line of text 16 pixels tall is only 2 cells tall in that grid. There's no room for the shape of an "e" in two cells.

Full size

1/8, scaled back up

Use a model that's good at text

Newer models handle text better partly because they keep more in the squeeze: Stability's SD3 paper found that a 16-channel latent rebuilt images far better than the old 4-channel one, and reported better typography.

For text-heavy images, start with a tool that says it's built for it: Ideogram, Nano Banana (Google lists "advanced text rendering" for infographics, menus and diagrams), ChatGPT images, FLUX.2 or Midjourney V6 and later. OpenAI is honest that its model "can still struggle with precise text placement and clarity", so check every word whichever you use.

Write the words so the model can read them

Put the exact text in double quotes. Midjourney only treats words in double quotes as text (single quotes don't count). Ideogram renders whatever is in quotes, with your spelling and capitals.

Keep it short and put it early. Ideogram says text near the start of the prompt comes out more reliably and every extra word raises the chance of a typo. Midjourney says short words work best and recommends adding "with the words", "text" or "written".

Say where and how: placement ("centred at the top", "curving along the bottom"), the look of the lettering ("bold condensed sans", "thin script"), size ("large headline", "small subheading"). FLUX.2's guide adds hex colours for brand text, e.g. the text "ACME" in #FF5733.

Rewrite this image prompt so the text renders cleanly. Tool: [TOOL]. Prompt: [PASTE]. The exact words I need: [WORDS]. Rules: put the words in double quotes near the start, keep each text block to 1 to 4 words where possible, say where each block sits and describe the lettering (weight, style, size, colour as hex). If I have more than two blocks of text, tell me which ones I should add afterwards in a design tool instead.

Give the letters more pixels

Make the text a bigger part of the frame. A sign filling a third of the picture survives; a label on a bottle in a wide shot won't. Crop in or change the composition before anything else.

Generate bigger. Midjourney V8.1 and later have HD images (2048 px, --hd or in settings). Nano Banana's Gemini 3 image models make 1K by default and can output 2K or 4K. OpenAI's newest image models accept custom sizes up to 3840 × 2160, with anything above 2560 × 1440 marked experimental (as of October 2026).

In Automatic1111 or Forge, turn on Hires. fix: it renders small, upscales, then adds detail in a second pass (defaults: Upscale by 2, Denoising strength 0.7). A bigger image means a bigger latent, so more cells per letter.

Repair just the text (or the face)

Don't regenerate the whole image to fix one word. Paint over the text area and redo only that.

Automatic1111 and Forge: in inpaint, set Inpaint area to Only masked. It enlarges just the masked area to your working resolution, redraws it, and pastes it back, so the letters get far more latent cells than they had. For faces in the distance, the ADetailer extension finds faces automatically and inpaints them the same way.

Midjourney: use the Editor on the web (Vary Region in Discord) on the text. Note that edits on HD images come back at SD size, so upscale again after. Ideogram: fix only the text in Studio with AI edit or Select area (Select area needs a paid plan).

I'm inpainting a sign in [TOOL] that should read "[WORDS]". Write the inpaint prompt for just the masked area: the exact words in double quotes, the lettering style, colour and material so it matches the rest of the image (describe what you can see in my picture), and nothing about the rest of the scene.

Upscale without making it worse

AI upscalers invent detail to fill new pixels, and invented detail on letters often means invented letters. Upscale text-heavy images with the creativity (or similar) setting at its lowest, compare the words before and after, and keep the version where they're still right.

When the words must be exact, add them yourself

For prices, dates, names, legal lines or anything longer than a short headline, generate the image without the text and add real type on top. Ideogram itself says to add long body copy later in a design tool. Real text is sharp at any size and you can fix a typo in seconds.

Ideogram's Studio can also turn existing text into editable layers with Layerize text, though it won't catch every decorative word. Otherwise use Canva, Figma, Photoshop, or ask Claude to build the overlay.

Here is my image. Build a text overlay for it as an HTML page I can download as a PNG at the image's full size: headline "[HEADLINE]", subline "[SUBLINE]", placed [WHERE], in [FONT or "a font that suits the image"], colour taken from the image, with enough contrast to read on a phone. Also give me a prompt to regenerate the image without any lettering, in case the old text is in the way.

Regenerate a clean background

If the image already has garbled text where your real text should go, regenerate or inpaint that area as empty space first, then add your type on top.

Rewrite my prompt so the image has a clean, empty area for text and no lettering anywhere: [PROMPT]. Say where the empty area is (e.g. "plain sky across the top third"), and remove every word that might make the model draw text (sign, label, poster, book cover, logo).

Several blocks of text

Describe each block with its own words, style and position, in reading order from top to bottom (Ideogram's advice). On Ideogram 4.0 and 4.5 a JSON prompt can set each block's text, colour and bounding box, but check the result: it guides the layout without guaranteeing it.