The strategy and the recipes for AI-assisted assets: which tools, which workflows, and the exact starter prompts — built so real photography stays the autobiography and AI plays everything else. Created July 8, 2026.
Real photography carries the brand. AI multiplies it. Every asset lives in exactly one of four lanes — the lane decides the tool, the rules, and whether it's logged as AI.
| Lane | What it is | Tools | Disclosure & log |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Real | Your photos and phone b-roll, graded to the house preset. The autobiography — pairing frames, family, product on real people. | Camera + Lightroom (house preset) | None. Not AI. |
| 2 · Assisted | Real frame, AI-touched: extend a graded photo to 9:16, clean a distraction out of a background, relight a corner. The photograph is still the photograph. | Photoshop generative expand / fill (Firefly) | Log it. No public label needed for cleanup-level edits; never "assist" a face, a body, or the garment. |
| 3 · Composite | Real product pixels, generated world. A real still-life or flat-lay photo of the vest, environment built around it. Product is untouched — that's the law. | Nano Banana Pro (Gemini), Photoshop | Log it + label when published as imagery of the product in a place ("studio composite" energy — never captioned as a real trip). |
| 4 · Atmosphere | Fully synthetic place-and-texture frames and clips. No people, no product, no autobiography. The Como shoreline behind a planning-season Reel. | Midjourney / Nano Banana Pro → Veo (motion) | Log it + expect platform auto-labels (see compliance). Caption never claims "our trip." |
Chosen for replicability and simplicity, not maximal capability: fewest tools that hold the aesthetic, all driven by prompt templates you reuse. Roughly $40–60/mo incremental on top of Adobe you already own.
| Job | Primary | Why this one | Backup / when to switch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Image — edit & composite | Nano Banana Pro (in Gemini, ~$20/mo Google AI Pro) | Best-in-class at instruction-following edits and multi-image reference consistency: feed it the real product photo + a reference frame of the house look and tell it what to keep. This is the Lane 3 engine. | Photoshop generative fill for surgical local edits where you need layer control. |
| Image — atmosphere | Midjourney v7 (~$10–30/mo, optional) | Still the best raw aesthetic for filmic, painterly atmosphere plates (Lane 4). Weak at edits — use it for first-generation beauty only. | Nano Banana Pro does this well enough to skip the subscription; add MJ only if atmosphere volume grows. |
| Image — extend & clean | Photoshop / Firefly generative expand (owned) | Adobe-stock-trained = the commercially safest generator; integrated with the Lightroom grade workflow. The Lane 2 engine: one hero frame → 1:1, 4:5, 9:16, 16:9. | Lightroom Remove for small distractions. |
| Video — image-to-video | Veo 3.1 (in the same Google AI Pro sub, via Gemini/Flow) | Strongest all-rounder in mid-2026 — best fabric/light physics, native audio, vertical output; its default look is closest to high-end stock, which after the house grade reads editorial. Start every video from a graded still, never from text alone. | Kling 3.0 for volume on a budget (~$1/10s clip). Runway Gen-4.5 when you need motion-brush control (animate background only, lock the product). Do not build on Sora — OpenAI is discontinuing it (app Apr 2026, API Sept 2026). |
| Music | Native Instagram audio first; ElevenLabs Music (~$5–22/mo) for owned surfaces | Reels should ride licensed in-app audio (reach + zero risk). For the site, email GIFs→video, YouTube, and anything embedded, ElevenLabs has the cleanest commercial license in the market — licensed training data, explicit ad/commercial rights, no litigation history. | Suno Pro also grants commercial rights but sits under active litigation and distributor blocks — fine for drafts, not for the brand's permanent surfaces. |
| Voice / speech | Real founder voice + Adobe Enhance Speech | The voice doc's whole thesis is that Haley and Trevor are the trust signal — VO stays human. AI's job is cleanup: kitchen-table recordings in, studio-adjacent audio out. | ElevenLabs TTS only for internal scratch tracks while editing; never published. |
| Virtual try-on / AI models | None — deliberately. | The 2026 fashion-AI category (Botika, FASHN, Claid et al.) exists to put garments on synthetic models. That's absolute #2 broken as a service. Coordinated real families are the brand's one selling point; renting fake ones would spend the moat to save a shoot. | Revisit only for fit-visualization R&D, never for published imagery. |
The highest-ROI, lowest-risk workflow: one hero photograph from the July 24 shoot becomes site hero (16:9), feed (4:5), story (9:16), and Pinterest (2:3) without cropping away the negative space that is the brand.
continuation of overcast sky, same soft light.iv-ai-extend-<scene>-<ratio>-<nn>.The composite recipe from the art-direction doc, made concrete. Input: a clean, graded photo of the real garment (flat-lay, hung, or still-life — the A6/P2/P5 frames you're already capturing). Engine: Nano Banana Pro with the product photo as a hard reference.
Using the attached photograph, keep the garment EXACTLY as photographed — identical
fabric weave, quilting lines, stitching, zipper, drape, color, and label. Do not
regenerate, redraw, sharpen, or "improve" any pixel of the garment.
Replace only the environment: place the vest [draped over a rattan trattoria chair
on a stone terrace before opening / folded on a weathered teak bench beside a still
grey-green canal / laid on ivory linen in a villa window's soft north light].
Light the scene to match the garment photo's existing light direction and softness.
Muted, film-like editorial mood: lifted matte blacks, soft fine grain, restrained
palette of Brunswick green, ivory, stone, and soft sage. Vast quiet negative space;
the garment sits low and off-center. No people. 4:5 vertical.
Avoid: altered garment, added logos or text, warm golden push unless specified, harsh
shadows, busy props, HDR gloss, perfect symmetry, catalog-studio look.
The art-direction doc's six recipes are the prompt library; this is how to run them. No people, no product — those clauses stay in every prompt verbatim.
--ar 4:5 --style raw; in Gemini just state the ratio.assets/art-direction/broll/ai/ → iv-ai-atmo-<scene>-<nn>.The single biggest content multiplier: a graded still (real or AI) becomes 6–8 seconds of ambient video for Reels. Image-to-video only — never text-to-video — so the frame you approved is the frame that moves. Veo 3.1 via Gemini/Flow; the motion rules from the art-direction doc apply to AI motion exactly: slow, quiet, nothing bounces.
broll/ai/.[Como morning plate] Camera locked. Morning haze drifts almost imperceptibly across the water; tiny glints move on the surface; nothing else changes. Slow, quiet, documentary stillness. No people, no boats moving, no camera shake, no zoom.
[Empty trattoria terrace plate] Static camera. Dappled light through the vine canopy shifts gently as if a slow breeze; one linen tablecloth corner lifts once, softly, and settles. Everything else still. No people, no birds, no fast motion.
[Riviera pool edge plate] Locked frame. Water caustics ripple slowly across the travertine; the out-of-focus umbrella fringe sways a few millimeters. Heavy, warm, unhurried afternoon. No people, no splashes, no camera movement.
[Real packing-table photo] Barely perceptible 2–3% push-in over 8 seconds; window light intensity breathes very slightly as if a cloud passes. NOTHING in the frame moves or deforms — no fabric motion, no object motion. Preserve every detail of the photograph exactly.
Quiet instrumental, 70 bpm. Warm nylon-string guitar and soft felt piano, close and roomy like a living-room recording. No drums, no builds, no melody hook — texture, not song. Slightly tape-worn, ends unresolved. 60 seconds, loopable.
The aesthetic lives in reusable blocks, not in heroic one-off prompts. Treat prompts like the Lightroom preset: master blocks stay fixed; one variable changes per run.
| Element | Convention |
|---|---|
| Library | One doc (this one + the art-direction recipes) is canonical. New winning prompts get added here with the asset they produced — a prompt without its output frame teaches nothing. |
| The grade sentence | film-like editorial grade, lifted matte blacks, soft fine grain, muted saturation, palette of Brunswick green, ivory, stone, soft sage — appears verbatim in every image prompt. It's the brand's textual preset. |
| The negative block | no people, no product, no logos, no text, no watermark, no HDR, no oversaturation, no golden-hour default, no stock gloss — verbatim in every Lane 4 prompt. |
| Iteration protocol | Change one block per regeneration. Keep the losers' prompts for a week (they document what doesn't work). In Midjourney, reuse --seed when refining a near-miss. |
| Reference images | Keep a folder of 5 canonical "this is the look" frames (graded real photos). Attach one to every Nano Banana Pro session as the style anchor — reference beats adjectives. |
| Files & log | iv-ai-<workflow>-<scene>-<nn> into broll/ai/; every published asset gets its capture-log row with the lane number. Ten seconds of logging = the whole compliance story. |
Six assets to prove each workflow end-to-end, sized to feed the pre-launch calendar's August needs. Generate, then we iterate on feedback together.
| # | Asset | Workflow | Feeds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Best existing graded photo extended to 9:16 + 16:9 | W1 (Photoshop expand) | Story + site hero test |
| 2 | Vest-on-chair trattoria composite from a real flat-lay/still-life frame | W2 (Nano Banana Pro) | Feed, PDP support |
| 3 | Como-morning atmosphere plate, 4:5 + 9:16 pair | W3 | Planning-season Reels backdrop |
| 4 | That same plate animated — 8s quiet motion loop | W4 (Veo 3.1) | Reel b-roll bank |
| 5 | One real b-roll still (packing table) as a "living photo" | W4, camera-only motion | Reel opener |
| 6 | The 60-second house music bed | W5 (ElevenLabs) | Site + YouTube + lead magnet |