Ideogram, a company whose AI makes and edits pictures from typed instructions, announced a new option for its Precise Edit tool on Oct. 29. You mark the part of a picture you want to change, describe the change, and the AI works only inside a box around that part, then fits the result back into the whole picture. Ideogram says it works on pictures of up to about 67 million pixels, the tiny dots of color that make up a digital picture, with no visible seam and no mismatch in color.
The problem it solves is size. Sent whole, a big picture still comes back shrunk to fit, and that is still the standard setting. To keep its full size, people had to cut out a piece, edit it and paste it back themselves. Ideogram says everything outside the box now comes back exactly as it was sent.
In Ideogram's video, a box goes around the fireplace in a picture of a living room, the fireplace is changed, and the edited piece drops back into the room. The video goes on to change a staircase, a sofa, a ring and a car beside a tram. On its page, Ideogram shows a cap whose label lettering is garbled, fixed twice, both times with a photo of the real cap to copy. Without a box, the photo came back smaller and the letters were still muddled. Inside a box, the label reads cleanly and the photo keeps its full size.
It is open now in the Ideogram app and to developers, who can build it into their own software and pay up to 22 cents a picture, depending on the quality they pick. Ideogram says the size of the picture does not change the price.
A box has a size limit, so a change bigger than a modest patch of a very large picture still comes back shrunk. Every example so far comes from Ideogram, and several of its sample pictures were themselves made by AI. How well it handles people's own photos will be clearer once outside users try it.