Building a Repeatable Workflow
The difference between playing and working is repeatability: being able to quote a job, hit a deadline, and deliver something consistent. A workflow that holds up under a client brief looks roughly like this.
- Establish the look before you produce volume. Small, cheap explorations until you have three or four images that define the direction. Get sign-off on those.
- Lock your references. Style reference, character reference, palette. Everything afterwards is generated against them.
- Bring your own structure in. Sketch the compositions, or shoot them, or block them out. Use guided generation or image-to-image so the layouts are yours. This is what makes the set feel authored rather than assembled — and it is what strengthens your authorship claim.
- Generate in batches, then curate hard. Expect to keep a small fraction. The curation is the art direction.
- Fix rather than reroll. Inpaint, edit conversationally, composite. Rerolling a nearly-right image is how deadlines get missed.
- Upscale and finish in your normal tools. Grade, retouch, typeset, deliver.
- Archive the process — prompts, seeds, references, versions — with the job files. You will need it for the revision round, for the next job in the series, and potentially for an authorship question later.
On pricing. Price the outcome, not the hours, and be careful about competing on speed alone — that is a race where the tools get faster every quarter and you don't. What clients are paying for is judgement, consistency, revisions and someone accountable for the result. None of that got cheaper.