Refine an AI image instead of re-rolling it

The picture is almost right. The room, the light and the mood are what you wanted, and one thing is off: a hand, a lamp that sits in the wrong place, a colour on the wall. The reflex is to press Generate again and hope. That is a re-roll, and it throws away everything that was already right in order to get a second chance at the one part that was wrong.

There is a calmer loop: draft wide, pick the closest, then fix one area with an edit. It costs about the same per round and it moves in one direction. This post walks through it step by step.

Why re-rolling keeps you in place

Every render of the same prompt is a fresh draw. A new draw can fix your lamp and break your composition, and you are back to judging a whole picture again. Over ten re-rolls you do not get closer to the target, you just sample ten neighbours of it. The price per usable picture is what this habit quietly drives up.

Step 1: draft wide, and cheaply

Start with the cheapest model that can show the idea. A still from Still Lite starts at €0.30, against €0.40 for Still, so a handful of drafts costs less than one careless full-size render. Run the same prompt four times. Do not compare details yet; at this stage you are choosing a composition.

If you want the drafts to differ in wording only, pin the seed and change a phrase between runs, as in the seed explainer. If you want the drafts to differ in layout, leave the seed random and let the model roam. Either is fine, as long as you know which one you chose.

Step 2: pick the closest, not the best

Put the four side by side and ask one question: which of these needs the smallest change? That is not always the prettiest one. A plain draft with the right layout and one wrong object beats a gorgeous draft with the wrong layout, because layout is the part you cannot easily change later and a wrong object is the part you can.

• Layout, camera angle and subject placement decide the pick. They are the hard things to move afterwards.
• One wrong object, one wrong colour, one blemish do not decide it. An edit can reach those.
• A wrong mood or light sits in between: sometimes an edit fixes it, sometimes it redraws too much. Prefer a draft whose light is already right.

Step 3: write down the one thing

Before you touch anything, finish this sentence in plain words: the only thing I want different is ______. If you need an "and" to finish it, you have two edits, and they go in two rounds. One change per round is the rule from the edit-prompt guide, and this loop is where it pays off.

Step 4: fix it with an edit, not a new prompt

Open the models page, filter for the image-to-image type and pick an edit model. Download your chosen draft from the session feed or your library, attach it with + Image, and write the instruction. Name the thing, say what it becomes, and say what stays.

Check the result against the draft, not against your imagination. Look at the area you changed, then at the edges of that area, then at one thing far away that should not have moved. Edit models sometimes redraw a little more than you asked for, and the far-away check is how you catch it.

When a re-roll is the right call

Refining is not always the answer. If the pick has the wrong subject, the wrong layout or a face you dislike, an edit will fight the picture the whole way. In that case go back to Step 1 with a changed prompt. Small, local, well-named problems are for edits; structural problems are for a new draft.

Hands and text sit on the line between the two. Small flaws there often respond to one targeted edit, but the hands and text guide covers what to prompt around and when to give up on a draft.

What this cannot do

• An edit model redraws the area it changes, so a repaired object may look slightly different from the original in texture or edge. Zoom in before you call it done.
• Each round is a fresh render of the whole file. Many rounds in a row can soften detail, so stop after two or three and run the finished picture through an upscale if you need crispness.
• No instruction guarantees that nothing else moves. The lock sentence lowers the odds; it does not remove them.
• Faces of real people are a consent question, not a technical one. Edit only pictures you have the right to change.

The loop in short: four drafts, pick the closest, name one change, edit, check, repeat at most twice. You can run the first round in the studio right now.