Hand deformities are the most common AI image failure. Negative prompts can only reduce the rate; ControlNet or inpaint actually fix them.
Three solutions
Solution 1 · Negative prompts (light)
Negative: (deformed hand:1.3), extra fingers, fused fingers, missing fingers, malformed hand
Effective on SD 1.5/SDXL, barely effective on Flux.
Solution 2 · ControlNet OpenPose Full / DWPose (medium)
Use DWPose to extract finger skeletons from a reference image and force the AI to follow them. Success rate 80%+. See the OpenPose tutorial.
Solution 3 · Inpaint repaint (strongest)
- After generation, frame-select the hand area
- Mask the malformed hand
- Set denoise 0.6–0.8
- Repaint with the prompt "natural detailed hand with 5 fingers, anatomically correct"
- Stack a hand-specific LoRA if needed
Per-model hand accuracy
| Model | Hand accuracy |
|---|---|
| SD 1.5 | ★★ (frequent errors) |
| SDXL | ★★★ |
| MJ v6 | ★★★★ |
| Flux Dev | ★★★★★ (almost never wrong) |
| Niji 6 (anime) | ★★★ (simplified hands tolerate more) |
Recommendation: If hands are critical, generate on Flux Dev. For other models, use inpaint on the hand area as a finishing step.