A style reference is an image ( or set of images ) provided to an AI generation system to communicate the desired visual aesthetic, look, and feel of the output. Rather than describing a style purely in text, a style reference gives the model a concrete visual example to draw from, communicating colour palette, lighting quality, compositional conventions, surface treatment, artistic medium, and tonal register through direct visual demonstration rather than language. Style references translate the inherently visual communication of aesthetic intent into a format that AI generation models can process and act upon.
The use of visual references to communicate creative direction is a foundational practice in professional production across film, advertising, design, and illustration. Directors present cinematographers with film stills to communicate intended colour and lighting. Art directors share mood boards with photographers and illustrators to establish the visual world of a campaign. AI generation extends this established practice by allowing reference images to function as conditioning inputs that directly influence generation outputs, rather than simply as informal inspiration to be interpreted by a human collaborator. The visual information in a well-chosen reference image communicates texture, contrast, warmth, style, and spatial quality that would take dozens of descriptive words to approximate: and even then text would convey the information less precisely than the image itself.
Effective style references share several qualities. They clearly represent the target aesthetic rather than containing multiple competing visual styles that might confuse the model's interpretation. They are technically clean: well-exposed, high-resolution, and free of compression artefacts that might be misread as stylistic features. They are contextually relevant to the content being generated: a reference image from a different genre, period, or production context than the target content can introduce unintended visual associations. Using multiple references that collectively define different aspects of the target aesthetic: one image for colour palette, another for lighting quality, a third for compositional approach: allows more precise specification of complex styles that no single reference image could capture alone.
In Morphic's workflow, style references are stored in the Assets tab of a project, where they can be accessed consistently across generation sessions. Uploading style references to the project at the outset, alongside character references and environment references, establishes the visual language of the production as a shared resource that all generation work within the project can draw from. This ensures that outputs from different sessions or different models maintain the same aesthetic coherence, which is particularly important for multi-clip projects where visual consistency across all generated footage is essential to the finished production's quality.
