Scenes: Generate vs. Edit Image

🎨 Should I use Generate or Edit Image to fix my scene's visual?

The Visual tab has two tabs at the top: Generate and Edit Image. Picking the wrong one for a small fix is one of the most common reasons a character ends up looking completely different than intended.

The rule

• Use Generate when you want to replace the scene's image entirely: a new prompt, a different composition, a different moment. Tag your characters, objects, and locations with '@' and write the full shot from scratch.
• Use Edit Image when you want a targeted, isolated change: a shirt color, a removed object, a camera angle nudge, without touching anything else in the frame.

🚨 A common mistake: going to Generate and writing something like "change his shirt to blue." Generate re-runs the entire image from your prompt; it doesn't know to leave everything else untouched, so the whole shot can come out different, not just the shirt. For a small change like that, use Edit Image instead.

Fixing a character that's drifted from their reference

If a character has drifted from how they're supposed to look, anchor the fix to your locked character reference:

1. Open the scene, go to Visual → Edit Image.
2. Write a prompt referencing both the current frame and the correct character, for example: "Update the current frame, make the actor look like @current_frame, and match @Leo."
3. This gives Atlabs two references to work from: the scene's current composition and the correct character appearance, rather than one.

💡 Tip: Image and motion models are probabilistic; the same prompt can occasionally produce different results even when tagged correctly. If a fix doesn't land the first time, retrying with the same prompt and switching the model can help.

Updated on: 09/23/2026