Feed the original reference every time. The moment you feed a render back in, the product starts dying by degrees.
The problem
It feels efficient: you made a good shot, so you use it as the reference for the next one. But every generation resamples what it was given, and small errors compound. The label softens. The material shifts a fraction. Do it four times and the jar in image five is not the jar in image one — and because each step was small, you won’t notice until you lay them out together.
One image is the master: the clean, sharp, well-lit original of the actual product. Every asset in the campaign is generated from that file. Never from its own output.
The rule
Generational decay is invisible per step and obvious in aggregate. That’s exactly the kind of error that gets through a review and into a client delivery.
The naming convention is not fussiness. When you’re six hours into a campaign at 2am, the filename is the only thing standing between you and a corrupted set.
You can pass two references — the master for the product and a separate image for the look — and that’s the correct way to chase a style without paying the decay.
What to watch for
- Label sharpness dropping across a set is the earliest visible symptom.
- Any output you were especially pleased with is the one you’ll be tempted to promote to master. Don’t.
- If the master itself is soft or badly lit, everything downstream inherits it. Reshoot the master on a phone before starting rather than fixing it later.
The drill
Run the decay deliberately so you never forget the shape of it. Take a master, generate a render, then use that render as the reference for the next, and repeat five times. Lay all six in a row. Somewhere around the third or fourth the product stops being the product. That's the picture to remember.
