# Small Edits, Big Difference: Scoping a Text-Based Photo Edit

Text-based editing is at its best when the change is narrow. Asking for a different jacket colour is predictable; asking to make the photo look better is not. The skill is in scoping the edit.

Start with what must stay the same. Name it in the prompt: keep the pose, the background and the lighting; change only the sleeve fabric. Listing the unchanged parts is often more useful than a long description of the new part.

Then describe the change in physical terms. Instead of nicer, say a coarse linen weave in sand colour. Instead of more dramatic, say lower the exposure and add a warm rim light on the right.

Edit one region per pass. If you need a new colour and a new background, do them in two steps and keep the better intermediate result. Stacking edits in one instruction raises the chance that one of them is ignored.

Compare at full size. Place the original and the edit side by side and flip between them; subtle drift in faces or logos is easier to catch that way.

If you want to practise on your own photos, the Image 2.5 editor accepts a picture and a text instruction, so you can run a few narrow edits and see how each one behaves. Keep the original file untouched and save each edit under a new name, which makes it easy to go back to the step that worked.

A good habit is to write the edit as a sentence you could hand to a retoucher. If a person would need to ask a follow-up question, the prompt is probably not specific enough yet.