After ~400 Z-Image Turbo gens I finally figured out why everyone's portraits look plastic

A Reddit user on r/StableDiffusion discovered that the "plastic" look common in Z-Image Turbo portraits stems from the model's default bias toward "beauty stock photography" — Z-Image Turbo's default prior is essentially glossy stock photography, and without specifying a camera, lens, film stock, or non-idealized facial features, it defaults to that airbrushed aesthetic every time. The fix is unintuitive: Z-Image responds to precise photography vocabulary rather than emotional or quality modifiers, and vague words like "average," "normal," and "realistic" do almost nothing on their own. Out of the box, results often look like "melted plastic" with missing texture , but grounding prompts in specific technical photographic terms — such as lens type, lighting setup, and explicit skin-detail descriptors — effectively breaks the model out of its glossy default.

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Source: local-ai