Inpainting: Change Only That One Spot, Leave Everything Else Untouched

You spent ages getting it right, and the image finally clicked. The composition, the lighting, the character's expression, all good, except the shirt on the character is the wrong color. Or a random passerby is standing in the background, breaking the mood no matter how you look at it. This is the most frustrating moment. Regenerate the whole thing and you risk losing the feel you finally captured. Leave it and that one flaw keeps catching your eye. What you actually need is not a redraw, but to change only that one spot.

Why Not Just Generate a New One

Many people, faced with a small flaw, instinctively tweak the prompt and run it again, betting the next one will be better. The problem is that regenerating reshuffles the entire image, and the ninety percent you wanted to keep gets swapped out too. The pose that looked just right, the background that worked, the rare on-point mood, all start over, and with bad luck it only gets worse.

Inpainting takes a different path. Its core idea is simple: only the area you frame gets changed, and every pixel outside the frame is fully preserved. So it is not a luck-based reroll, but a surgical, precise replacement. Whatever you target is the only thing that changes, with no ripple through the rest.

A Full Walkthrough

The operation is more intuitive than you would expect. First upload the image you want to fix, then paint over the area to change directly on the image, drawing a mask that tells the system to change here. Once painted, describe in the inpainting prompt field what that area should become, then submit to generate.

The painting step comes with a full toolbox. Besides the basic brush, there is a lasso, a rectangle, and a circle to quickly frame regular or irregular regions, fill to cover a large area at once, and an eraser to trim edges you painted past. Brush size is adjustable, smaller for finer control when retouching small objects, larger to save effort on big background areas. Paint something wrong and there is no need to panic, you can undo at any time, or just clear the mask and start over.

A Real Example

Say the image in your hands is good overall, except the lead is wearing a gray shirt when you wanted red. Do not touch any other setting. Just take the brush and carefully paint over the shirt's full extent, missing none of the collar, sleeves, or hem. With the mask drawn, write put on a red shirt in the inpainting prompt and generate. In the result, the shirt turns red while the character's face, pose, and background stay exactly as before, because those areas were never touched.

The same approach extends to many situations. Want a cat added on the sofa? Paint over where the cat should go and write add a cat. Want to clear that clutter in the background? Frame it entirely and write remove the background clutter, and the system clears it and fills in a plausible background. If you already have a concrete idea of how the result should look, you can also attach a reference image. This field is optional, but adding it lets the system better grasp what you want and saves the back-and-forth of trial.

Two Small Tricks

First, when masking, err on covering the edges rather than leaving them short. If your painted area does not fully cover the object to be changed, the edges often retain a ring of old color or residue, which looks even more jarring. Carefully fill along the object's outline and use the eraser to trim any overflow, and the result will be much cleaner.

Second, the prompt should describe only that area, not the whole image. The inpainting prompt is about what the framed region should become, so you only need to say put on a red shirt without restating the character's appearance, background, and lighting all over again. The more focused the prompt, the less the system gets distracted.

Common Questions

Will changing one spot cause the area beside it to change too? No. Pixels outside the frame are fully preserved, which is exactly the biggest difference between inpainting and regenerating.

So when should you redo the whole thing versus use inpainting? The judgment is easy: if you are already ninety percent happy with the result and just need to fix one spot, remove a passerby or clutter, or replace one object, inpainting is definitely more precise than redrawing the whole image. Conversely, if you have not even settled the composition and direction, you are still in the regeneration stage, so get the broad strokes right first, then come back and use inpainting to finish.

In the end, inpainting fills in that last mile of creation. The first ninety percent relies on generation to get the picture in place, and that final spot that bothers you is handed to inpainting to clean up stroke by stroke, so the whole image is finally complete.