Hi everyone,
I’m on the Plus plan and I’m building an automated pipeline that recolours one specific part of a product photo: motorcycle seats where only the side panel, the piping, the stitching and the embroidered logo change colour, and the rest of the seat must stay untouched.
The Change Color tool in the web app does exactly this, and does it very well. What seems to matter is that it takes the target colour in its own field and the description only names which parts to change, so it replaces the colour and leaves the shape and the material alone.
I tried to reproduce it through the API using editWithAI.mode=ai.auto and editWithAI.prompt on /v2/edit, since that is the closest thing available. It is not equivalent: with the colour written inside the prompt, the model regenerates the image rather than recolouring it. Across 24 images (3 seat models x 8 colours) it produced 9 unusable results: the coloured panel grows into the black area of the seat, the suede texture gets replaced by a smooth surface, and in one case it added a second BMW badge that does not exist on the product. Those numbers already include up to 4 retries per image with different seeds, and I have spent roughly 180 images of my monthly quota getting there. Running the same seats through the web app tool gives a correct result on the first attempt, with a much simpler description and no extra instructions about preserving the shape or the texture.
The comparison above shows the source photo, the result from editWithAI, and the result from the Change Color tool in the web app, all with the same target colour. In the API version the panel has grown along the bottom of the seat and the embroidered logo stayed yellow; in the web app version the panel keeps its original shape and the logo is recoloured correctly.
I also confirmed that editWithAI.mode only accepts ai.auto (the API answers “editWithAI/mode must be equal to constant” for anything else), and I could not find any colour replacement parameter in the OpenAPI specification or in the documentation.
Is the Change Color tool available through the Image Editing API, or is it planned? If not, is there a trusted tester programme I could join for it? And if there is a supported way to get this behaviour through /v2/edit that I have missed, I would be glad to hear it.
For context on volume: if this works, I would be processing around 24 images per product over a catalogue of several hundred products.
Thanks,
David