renderloopGet the book
The method

Process

From prompt to final render, one honest step at a time. No magic — just the moves that repeat.

Workflow

Prompt to Final Render

How a rough generation becomes a finished, production-ready image — the five moves I make every time.

  • FLUX.1
  • ControlNet (depth)
  • img2img
  • Ultimate SD Upscale
  • Photoshop
  1. Prompt to Final Render — step 1: Draft the idea1
    FLUX.1

    Draft the idea

    Start loose. A short, structured prompt — subject, setting, light, mood — and a batch of seeds. The goal is not a good image yet; it is to find a frame worth developing.

    Watch out: Over-writing the prompt. Long prompts fight themselves; add detail once you know which frame you are chasing.

  2. Prompt to Final Render — step 2: Take control2
    ControlNet (depth)

    Take control

    Lock the composition with a control pass. A depth ControlNet keeps the architecture straight and the perspective honest so the model stops reinventing the room every seed.

    Watch out: Cranking control weight to 1.0 — it flattens the light. Keep it around 0.5–0.7 and let the model breathe.

  3. Prompt to Final Render — step 3: Refine3
    img2img + inpaint

    Refine

    Run it back through img2img at a low denoise to raise coherence, and inpaint the parts that broke — usually edges, hands, and anything with text.

    Watch out: Denoising too hard and losing the frame you liked. Small steps, compare often.

  4. Prompt to Final Render — step 4: Upscale4
    Ultimate SD Upscale

    Upscale

    Push to delivery resolution with a tiled upscaler so textures sharpen without inventing new detail in the wrong places.

    Watch out: A single giant upscale — it hallucinates. Tile it, and keep the added detail low.

  5. Prompt to Final Render — step 5: Finish by hand5
    Photoshop

    Finish by hand

    Bring it into a real editor. Colour grade, fix the last artifacts, and make the deliberate choices the model can't. This is where a render becomes a piece.

    Watch out: Shipping the raw render. The finishing pass is the difference between 'looks AI' and 'looks made'.

See this method on the finished work, and the full treatment in the book.