Only the Wrong Thing

Only the Wrong Thing

What this makes

Hand it a photograph with one material that reads wrong — gritty ice, plastic wool, rubbery bread — and it fixes that and refuses to touch anything else. Two fields.

You are given ONE photograph with ONE thing wrong with it. Return ONE image: the same photograph with that thing corrected and everything else identical. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the photograph and the fields?

Say what this makes before you ask anything, in one or two sentences of their own words. Someone who has just pasted this has no idea what they are being asked for, and questions arriving cold are questions answered badly.

If no photograph is attached, stop and ask for one. There is nothing to repair without it, and a picture generated from the description instead is a different picture that resembles the answer.

If either field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put both questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then work. Never fill a brace yourself.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

If the photograph is attached and both fields are filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these two lines only

• The one thing that is wrong: {a thing that can be found in the frame}
• What is wrong with it, and what it should read as: {the fault, and the material it should read as}

The law everything else follows from

Change what is broken. Everything else is not yours to improve.

The temptation in a repair is to make the picture better, and better is the enemy here: warmer light, a tighter crop, a cleaner background, a richer colour. Every one of those makes the result unusable, because the reader is putting this back beside pictures that were not improved. A repair that cannot be set next to the original as the same picture is a new picture.

What counts as broken is named in the fields and nowhere else. It is never inferred from the picture, and it never grows during the work.

What survives, and what does not

Changes — only this: the material named in the fields, and the light behaving on it, because a surface that changes changes how it takes light. Nothing else follows from it: a duller ice does not justify a warmer table.

Held, exactly:

• Composition, crop, aspect ratio, and the position of every object.
• Colour balance, white point, exposure and contrast across the frame.
• The light: its direction, its hardness, every shadow and highlight not on the repaired thing.
• Every other material, including ones that are also imperfect.
• Grain, focus, depth of field and any lens character.

The check is subtraction. Lay the two frames over each other. The named thing should be the only region that moves. Anything else that changed is the failure this template exists to catch.

The physical fact

Build the fix from why the material reads right, not from what it should look like.

"Natural", "appetising", "realistic" and "high quality" are adjectives, and an adjective gives the run nothing to do except make the picture prettier. A material that has gone wrong has gone wrong in a way that can be stated:

• Snow and shaved ice read as a solid soft mass because no single crystal is separable at that distance — grain below what the eye resolves, not gravel.
• Wool reads as wool because loose fibre ends catch light away from the surface, so the edge of the form is slightly undefined.
• Bread reads as bread because the crumb is open and irregular and the crust breaks the light differently from the inside.
• Skin, fur, foam, rust, cloth: each has one fact like this.

State the fact for the material in the fields, then correct the picture until the fact is true of it. The look follows; it is not the instruction.

The repair

• Work only inside the named thing's own edges. Where it meets something else, the join moves with it and the other side does not.
• Keep its shape, its position and its colour. A texture repair is not a recolour: if the ice was pink with syrup, it stays pink with syrup.
• Keep the imperfections that belong to it. A repair removes the fault named in the fields and nothing else — a chip, a crumb, a stray fibre stays.
• Match the frame it lives in: the same grain, the same focus, the same light. A perfectly sharp patch inside a soft photograph is another way of failing.

Never

• A change to anything not named in the fields.
• A crop, a rotation, a resize, or an extension of the frame.
• Lettering, numerals, labels, arrows, callouts or watermarks anywhere, in any script.
• A before-and-after split, a side-by-side, or a second panel. One frame comes back.
• A second attempt at the same fault inside one image.

What it should read as

The photograph the reader thought they had taken — indistinguishable from the original everywhere except the one place they were looking.