Creative Polish

Creative — Generative Polish

Turn a selected draft into a final, production-ready asset. This is the LAST stage — it only runs on an already-chosen visual. Polishing before a concept is locked wastes effort; this skill assumes the creative direction is settled and now it's about execution quality.

When to use

• A concept has been chosen (from explore/scene/shot/ads/offer) and needs finishing.
• An image has fixable flaws: artifacts, bad hands/text, off composition, wrong aspect.
• Conforming a winner to final delivery specs (size, ratio, color).

When NOT to use

• The concept isn't locked yet — polishing many candidates is wasteful; lock first.
• You need new concepts → the relevant explorer skill.
• The image is fundamentally wrong (bad composition at the core) — regenerate upstream instead of patching.

Inputs (ask only what's missing)

• The selected source image (path or reference).
• Target spec: final aspect/size, where it'll be used, brand constraints.
• What to improve — specific issues, or run a full pass.

Workflow

1. Diagnose the source. List concrete issues: artifacts, extra fingers/garbled text, composition imbalance, color cast, soft focus, wrong aspect, distracting background.
2. Decide per issue: edit (inpaint/region fix via an image-edit tool) when only a region is wrong — it keeps the rest stable; regenerate (re-prompt with stronger constraints + source as reference) when the issue is structural.
3. Apply passes in order: structural fixes → composition/crop → color grade → text legibility → final sharpen/export. Save iterations to ./creative/polish/.png so you can roll back.
4. Conform to final aspect/size for the target medium.
5. Show before/after and confirm it meets spec.

Worked example

Source: chosen hero from creative-shot, but has a duplicated keycap, blurry legend text, slightly cool cast, and is 1:1 but the hero slot needs 16:9.

issues: [duplicated keycap top-row] [legend text soft] [too cool ~-300K] [need 1792x1024]
passes:
 1. edit (inpaint): remove duplicate keycap, rebuild row — region fix, rest untouched
 2. regen-region: sharpen legend text, pass exact legends verbatim
 3. grade: warm +250K, lift shadows slightly
 4. crop/extend to 1792x1024 (outpaint left/right of product)
before: ./creative/shot/hero-34.png   after: ./creative/polish/hero-final.png
verify: keycaps correct, text crisp, neutral-warm, 1792x1024 ✓

Quality bar

• No visible generation artifacts (hands, text, duplicated/merged elements).
• Exact visible text/wording preserved — never mutated during edits.
• Color and contrast are intentional and consistent with the brand/set.
• Delivered at the correct final aspect and resolution for its use.

Common pitfalls

• Text mutation — regenerating a region silently changes wording. Always pass text verbatim and re-check.
• Full-regen when an edit would do — re-rolling the whole image loses everything that was already right. Prefer region edits.
• Polishing unlocked concepts — finishing 5 candidates nobody chose. Lock first.
• No rollback — overwriting the source. Save numbered iterations.

Handoff

This is the terminal stage. Output the final asset(s) at spec. If the user wants the same treatment across a set, apply the same pass recipe to each and verify consistency.

Tooling

Needs an image tool with edit/inpaint + generate support (ideally outpaint for aspect changes). If only generation (no edit) is available, prefer targeted regeneration with the source as reference; if no image tool at all, output the diagnosed issue list + the exact fix prompts.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: DKeken
• Source: DKeken/codex-skills-alternative
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.