A worked run, with the budget and the failure

The brief

A regional food brand. Twelve images for a spring campaign: four hero frames for print, eight social assets. One recurring character, a cook. One product, a jar, which exists and can be photographed. Deadline three weeks.

This is a realistic job and the numbers below are realistic.

Days one and two: the spec and the system

Write the spec. Placements and pixel sizes for all twelve. The forbidden list. Two rounds of revisions. Disclosure agreed.

Build the reference pack with the client: three directions, they choose one.

Photograph the jar. Half a day: window light, white card, four angles, thirty frames each. Cut out the best four. This library serves the entire campaign and every future one.

Write the system file: light, lens, palette, crop, finish.

Elapsed: roughly 8 hours. Generated images: about 20.

Days three and four: the character and the anchor

Generate a contact sheet of 30 portraits. Pick one, refine with seed variation. Build a character sheet of seven angles using a face adapter. Two hours.

Decide: twelve images, seen side by side, close scrutiny in print. Train a LoRA. Assemble and caption 22 images from the sheet, train on Kaggle, test the epochs, pick epoch six. Two hours including waiting.

Build the anchor frame: contact sheet, keeper checklist, full repair, grade, grain. Send for approval.

Elapsed: about 10 hours. Generated: about 150.

Day five: approval, and a change

The client approves the anchor but wants the palette warmer and the character a little older.

The warmer palette is a curve change, applied to the finish preset. Ten minutes, and it now applies to everything not yet made.

The character being older is the expensive one. It means a new character sheet and a retrained LoRA: about three hours. This is why the anchor is approved before the other eleven exist: at frame eleven this would have cost three days.

Elapsed: 3 hours.

Days six to eleven: the other eleven frames

Per frame, roughly:

• Contact sheet of 16 at low steps, pick two. (5 min)
• Full-quality renders of both with the LoRA, system prompt, and controls where needed. (5 min)
• Keeper checklist, repair list. (5 min)
• Repair: hands, face, edges, details. (30 to 50 min)
• Composite the jar where it appears, with contact shadow and grain. (20 min)
• Grade and grain from the preset. (5 min)

About 80 minutes a frame, so around 15 hours for eleven. The hardest frame (two people, hands passing the jar) takes three hours on its own and is done second rather than last.

Elapsed: about 15 hours. Generated: about 400.

Day twelve: the consistency pass

All twelve on one screen. Three are off: one warmer, one with the light from the wrong side, one cropped tighter.

The warm one and the tight crop are quick. The one lit from the wrong side is not fixable and is regenerated: two hours. This is a normal outcome and is why the schedule has slack in it.

Elapsed: about 4 hours.

Delivery

Export every size. QA pass against the forbidden list on each of twelve files. Alt text. Delivery folder, disclosure note, archive of the layered files and the LoRA.

Elapsed: about 3 hours.

The totals

About 43 hours. Roughly 600 generated images, of which 12 shipped. That is a 2% keep rate, and it is normal: most of the 600 were low-step contact-sheet frames costing seconds each.

The distribution is the useful part:

• Specification, system, product photography: 19%
• Character and anchor: 23%
• Generating the other eleven: 6%
• Repair and compositing: 35%
• Consistency, QA, delivery: 17%

Generation is six per cent of the work. Everything else is decisions made before it and craft applied after it, which is the argument this whole course has been making.

What actually goes wrong

Not the generating. In order of frequency: a change of direction after several frames are finished, an element that turns out to be ungeneratable and needs photographing, consistency problems found in the final pass, and the client wanting a size nobody mentioned at the start.

All four are addressed by the same two habits: approve the anchor before building the set, and do the hardest frame second. Neither is technical, and together they prevent more lost days than any setting in this course.