Made an image, without using inpainting whatsoever. Chose not to include characters to showcase the applicability of my previous advice on non-character focused compositions as well.

Rationale for checkpoint choice: Very good contrast and dark-light performance for a non-vpred model. I also wanted to try to see if I can make non-realistic compositions have good low-light performance.

What did I do different here?

I removed 'volumetric light' prompts so you can see its influence on a composition. The lanterns no longer give a soft glow compared to my other composition.

One thing to note is to consider not using 'hdr' when trying to make a low-light composition. It give the composition an unnatural lighting feel. For some reason 'sdr' did the same. It might just be my prompting, so don't take this as gospel.

Copied from my earlier submission (slightly edited):

This was the product of pretty heavy tinkering with Illustrious to learn more about how to manipulate lighting.

There was definitely heavy lifting from NTR-mix, it has great contrast capabilities.

Here are keywords of note:

(brushstrokes, high contrast): As a set, it helps with a more artsy composition and lends strength with making colours pop out more in dark compositions

(dim lighting, dark, night): Quintessential dark image composition prompt set. Use (object:X.Y) modifiers to manipulate how strongly you want this to impact your composition.

(black background): You can use this to force the model to prioritise more of its generation time on making more 'black' before it tries to generate other elements.

Voyager's thoughts:

I came across a new technique in the name of 'prompt scheduling' which might further help with this. You could queue 'dark prompts' to generate first before scheduling the rest of your composition, so that it further prioritises darkness, but I haven't had the time to experiment with it, so I didn't use it for this composition. (You can find more info at the end of this article: https://civitai.com/articles/4808/making-images-great-again-remastered).

Hope this helps on your journey ^_^