Lesson 5 of 7
Edit it — don't redo it
7 min read
The photo is almost perfect — but there's a stray sign in the corner, and the flat grey sky is dull. Do you roll the dice again and risk losing everything you liked? There's a better way: change only the part that's wrong.
The problem with starting over
You already know that rolling again gives you a whole new picture — new sky, new pose, new everything. That's fine when nothing's working, but terrible when almost everything is. Regenerating to fix one small flaw throws away all the parts you loved and gambles on getting them back. Most of the time you don't want a new picture — you want this one, with one thing fixed.
Regenerating changes the whole image, so it's the wrong tool for a small fix — you'd risk everything that already works to repair one corner.
Paint a mask, redo just that
The fix is to tell the tool where to work. You paint over the area you want changed — that painted area is called a mask — describe what should go there, and the tool regenerates only inside it, leaving everything else pixel-for-pixel the same. This is called inpainting: repainting one region of an existing image instead of remaking the whole thing. Try it below — pick a part and regenerate just that.
Inpainting redraws only the area you mask, leaving the rest untouched — so you repair or restyle one region without regambling the whole picture.
Growing the picture: outpainting
The same trick works outward. Extend the canvas past its edges and ask the tool to fill the new space, and it imagines what lies beyond the frame — turning a tight headshot into a full scene, or a square into a wide banner. That's outpainting: inpainting's twin, painting outside the picture instead of inside it.
Outpainting extends a picture beyond its edges, inventing what's around it — the same mask-and-fill idea, aimed outward instead of inward.
Starting from a picture, not just words
You can also hand the tool a whole picture to begin from — a rough phone snap, a scribbled sketch, an earlier result — and ask it to redraw in that shape. Feeding in an image instead of starting from pure noise is called image-to-image: your picture becomes the starting point, and your words steer how far it changes.
Reach for inpainting to fix or swap one thing, outpainting to add room around it, and a fresh generation only when you truly want to start over. Editing keeps the good parts; rerolling gambles them.
The gist
- —Rerolling remakes the whole image — the wrong move when you only need one small fix
- —Inpainting redraws just the area you mask; outpainting extends the picture beyond its edges
- —Image-to-image starts from a picture you give it, not from pure noise, and your words steer the change
Your generated street scene is great, but a road sign in one corner looks garbled. What's the cleanest fix?
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