Describe the change in plain English
The Custom text chat tab takes any instruction in ordinary language and applies it to the thumbnail. "Add lightning in the background and change the shirt colour to red." "Remove the coffee cup from the desk." "Make the whole thing feel colder and put frost on the window."
It is the catch-all for anything the presets do not cover — and it is the one editor tab available on every plan, including Free. Whatever tier you are on, you can always ask for any change in words.
Using it
- Open the thumbnail in the editor and select Custom text chat.
- Type what you want changed.
- Click Apply edit. One edit, one request.
- Undo if it is not right, then refine the wording rather than repeating it verbatim.
Pair it with click-to-edit: click the part of the image you mean first, then describe what should happen to it. Pointing removes the hardest part of writing the instruction.
Writing instructions that land
The difference between a good result and a frustrating one is almost always the wording. Four habits cover most of it:
- Name the object, not the vibe. "Change the hoodie to black" beats "make it edgier".
- State what must not change. This is the highest-value habit. "Change the background to a night sky. Keep the person, their pose, the text and the framing exactly as they are." Without that clause, a generative edit is free to reinterpret everything.
- One change per edit. Three instructions in one request gets you three half-applied changes. Do them in sequence.
- Be physically specific. "Add a hard blue light from the left, so the shadows fall right" gives a direction to follow. "Better lighting" does not.
The preservation clause
Almost every disappointing custom edit is missing it. Ending your instruction with "keep everything else exactly the same" is the single most reliable improvement you can make to your prompts.
Instructions worth stealing
| Goal | Instruction |
|---|---|
| Clean up clutter | "Remove the objects on the left side of the desk and reconstruct the surface naturally. Keep the subject, text and lighting unchanged." |
| Add a prop | "Put a stack of cash in the subject's right hand, lit by the same light as the rest of the scene. Change nothing else." |
| Wardrobe | "Change the shirt to a plain black hoodie. Keep the face, hair, pose and background identical." |
| Background swap | "Replace the background entirely with a plain dark studio backdrop. Keep the subject and all text exactly where they are." |
| Stronger separation | "Darken the background and add a bright rim light around the subject so they separate from it. Keep the composition." |
| Fix small text | "Make the small line of text at the bottom larger and white with a black outline. Do not change the headline." |
When to use a preset instead
If a preset exists for what you want, use it — presets are tuned to preserve the rest of the frame and are one click:
- Whole-frame colour treatment → Mood
- Backdrop elements → Scene
- Facial emotion → Expression
- Light direction → Lighting
- A different person → Face swap
- Exact word swap → Find & replace
The custom chat is for the long tail: props, wardrobe, weather, removing clutter, adding an object, anything specific to your frame.
Limits worth knowing
- Each edit is a fresh interpretation. Stacking many custom edits drifts the image. If you are five deep and unhappy, undo to a good state and write one better instruction.
- Instructions have a length cap. A focused two-sentence instruction outperforms a paragraph anyway.
- It edits, it does not compose from nothing. To change the fundamental subject of the image, generate a new thumbnail rather than editing this one into a different picture.