Image editor — crop, recolour, and annotate before you post

The image the AI gives you on the first try is usually 80% of the way there. The crop is fine but a little tight on the right. The shadows are deep enough that the basil reads almost black. You want a single line of text across the top for a story. Hitting Regenerate is a sledgehammer for that — you’d get a totally different photo and you’d pay another credit to land somewhere you might not even prefer. The image editor is the precision tool that lives next to Regenerate: same picture, your hands on it, no new charge.

What it does

When the Composer has produced an image for your draft, an Edit pill appears in the bottom-right corner of the preview. Clicking it opens a full-screen editor with four toolbelts down the side:

Adjust — crop to any ratio, rotate, flip horizontally or vertically. Useful when the AI framed a dish slightly off-centre or you want a square version of a portrait shot.
Finetune — brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure. Useful for warming up a photo that came back too cool, or pulling shadow detail out of a moody plate.
Filters — one-click looks (warm, cool, vintage, dramatic, etc.). Useful for matching a campaign mood without manually pushing sliders.
Annotate — drop text, shapes, freehand drawing, or arrows on top of the image. The most common use is story copy: a single line of bold text across a 9:16 vertical so viewers tapping through the story know what they’re looking at without sound.

When you hit Save, the editor uploads the modified image, the system re-saves it as a permanent file alongside your other post images, and the draft in the Composer swaps to the new version. The caption, hashtags, and alt-text don’t change — only the picture does.

The rule

Edit replaces. Regenerate restarts. Use Edit when the photo is almost right; use Regenerate when it’s wrong.

The two buttons aren’t interchangeable. Edit opens a photo retouching tool on the image you already have, and costs nothing because the AI work was already paid for. Regenerate throws the image away and asks the AI for a new one, which costs a credit and gives you a different photo — sometimes better, sometimes worse, never the same.

How to use it

Open Growth → Composer. Pick a dish or write a free idea. Hit Generate post. The right column fills in with a caption, hashtags, and an image.

Hover the image (or just look at it on a touch screen) — a small Edit pill in the bottom-right corner of the picture is your way in. Click it.

The editor takes over the whole screen. The top header shows Edit image on the left and a Cancel button on the top-right — Cancel backs out without saving anything. Below the header, the left side of the canvas is the picture; the right side and bottom strip are the toolbelts.

Recropping

Click Adjust in the top tab bar. The crop tool opens with a handle frame on the picture. You can drag the handles to recrop freely, or click the ratio dropdown for presets — Square, Portrait (4:5), Story (9:16), Landscape (16:9), plus classic-TV and cinemascope if you ever need them. Pick a ratio, drag the frame to the part of the picture you want, hit Apply.

Rotate and flip live in the same tab — rotate is for fixing a tilted plate, flip is for matching the orientation of a previous post in the same series.

Brightness, contrast, colour

Click Finetune. Four sliders: brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure. Drag, see the preview update live, hit Apply to lock the change. You can undo any individual change with the curved-arrow undo button at the top.

The most common move: pull brightness down 10 and push contrast up 15 for a moody, restaurant-at-night look. Or push saturation up 20 if a herb is rendering a little washed-out.

Filters

Click Filters. A row of one-click presets — each thumbnail shows what the filter does to your picture. Tap one to preview, tap Apply to commit. Filters stack with finetune, so you can pick a filter first then push the brightness if needed.

Adding text or stickers

Click Annotate. The toolbar shows Text, Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Pen, Line, Arrow, Image (paste a sticker on top).

For a story headline, click Text, click on the image where you want the text, type your line. Click the text to bring up font, size, colour, alignment. Hold and drag to reposition.

Saving

When the picture is what you want, hit Save in the top-right corner of the editor (the Filerobot toolbar). The editor shows a brief Saving — uploading to storage and republishing… banner, then closes. You’re back in the Composer with the new image in the preview. Hit Save as draft in the Composer to lock the whole post in your calendar, or Generate again on the caption if the new image makes you want different words.

Worked example

Marco generated a 1:1 image for his Pizza Tartufata post on Tuesday. The pizza is dead-centre on a dark wooden board, beautifully shot, but the truffle shavings are in shadow and read almost grey instead of the rich brown he wants.

He clicks Edit on the image. The editor opens. He goes to Finetune, pulls exposure up by 12 and saturation up by 8. The truffles pop into colour. He hits Apply.

He stays in Finetune and bumps contrast up by 10 to deepen the wood-grain board behind the pizza — now the dish reads as the hero instead of competing with a flat backdrop.

He goes to Adjust, picks the Portrait (4:5) crop ratio, drags the frame so the pizza’s left edge sits a third of the way in (rule-of-thirds composition, not centred), and hits Apply.

He hits Save. The editor closes. The Composer preview now shows the recropped, recoloured 4:5 portrait. The caption is unchanged. He hits Save as draft. The post is locked in the calendar for Friday at 18:00.

No new credit charge. Total time in the editor: about 90 seconds.

What it doesn’t do

It doesn’t replace the image with a different one — that’s Regenerate.
It doesn’t write a new caption — captions are tied to the post, not the image.
It doesn’t undo across sessions — if you close the editor and reopen it, your previous edits are baked into the saved image, not on an undo stack.
It doesn’t change the active aspect ratio you’re viewing. If you crop a 1:1 down to 4:5, the image saves under the same 1:1 slot you opened it from. To work on a different ratio, switch the aspect tab in the Composer first, then open the editor.

Composer — the page that produces the image you’re editing.
Calendar — where the edited post lands after you save.
Voice & Brand — set the style and tone that shape what the AI gives you on first pass.