The Complete AI Image Editing Workflow: Upscale, Relight, Style & Expand

Four Tools, One Workflow

FP AI Studio includes four dedicated AI image editing tools: Upscale, Relight, Style Transfer, and Expand. Each tool addresses a specific aspect of image enhancement, and when used together in the right order, they form a powerful editing pipeline that can transform any image — whether AI-generated, a stock photo, or a personal photograph — into a polished, professional-quality visual.

All four tools work with an image URL as input. You paste the URL of your source image, configure any available settings, and the AI processes your image. The output is a new image that you can download or use as input for the next tool in your workflow.

Tool 1: Upscale

The Upscale tool is the simplest of the four. You provide an image URL and the AI enhances the resolution by up to 4x. There are no additional controls or settings — the AI analyzes the image, identifies details, textures, and edges, and intelligently fills in the additional pixels to create a sharper, higher-resolution version.

What It Does

• Increases image resolution up to 4x the original dimensions
• Sharpens details and reduces artifacts from lower-resolution sources
• Preserves the original composition, colors, and style
• Works with any image type: photographs, illustrations, AI-generated art

Best For

Use Upscale when your image looks good but is too small for your intended use. This is common with AI-generated images, old photographs, screenshots, or stock images that need to be printed or displayed at large sizes. The tool is also excellent for recovering detail from compressed images or low-resolution downloads.

Tool 2: Relight

The Relight tool takes an image URL and applies AI-powered lighting transformation. The AI analyzes the existing lighting conditions in your image and modifies them to create a different mood, atmosphere, or visual impact.

What It Does

• Analyzes existing light sources, shadows, and highlights
• Applies new lighting conditions while preserving the subject and composition
• Can transform flat, evenly-lit images into dramatically lit scenes
• Adjusts color temperature, shadow depth, and highlight intensity

Best For

Relight excels at fixing mediocre lighting in photographs, adding drama to flat product shots, creating golden-hour effects on daytime photos, and establishing mood in portrait images. If you have ever thought "this would look so much better with different lighting," Relight is the answer. It is particularly valuable for stock photos that have technically correct but emotionally flat lighting.

Tool 3: Style Transfer

Style Transfer is the most configurable editing tool, accepting three inputs: the source image URL, a reference style image URL, and an optional style description prompt. The AI blends the content of your source image with the visual style of the reference image.

What It Does

• Preserves the subject and composition of your source image
• Applies the color palette, textures, brushwork, or aesthetic of the reference style image
• Accepts an optional text prompt to further describe the desired style
• Creates unique artistic interpretations that blend both inputs

Best For

Style Transfer is ideal for turning photographs into artistic interpretations, creating consistent visual themes across a set of images, applying brand-specific aesthetics to stock photos, or transforming ordinary images into specific art styles. The reference image gives you precise control — instead of describing a style in words, you show the AI exactly what you want. The optional prompt adds a layer of text-based guidance on top of the visual reference.

Tool 4: Expand

The Expand tool uses Flux Pro AI to extend the canvas of an image beyond its original borders. You provide an image URL and optionally an expansion prompt describing what should appear in the newly generated areas.

What It Does

• Extends the image canvas outward in all directions
• Uses Flux Pro to generate contextually appropriate content for the new areas
• Maintains seamless blending between the original image and expanded regions
• Accepts an optional prompt to guide what appears in the expanded space

Best For

Expand is perfect for adapting images to different aspect ratios (turning a square image into a widescreen banner), adding environmental context to tightly cropped subjects, creating panoramic versions of landscape photos, or building out background space for text overlays in marketing materials. The expansion prompt helps when you want specific elements in the new areas, such as "continuation of the forest with a mountain range in the distance."

The Optimal Workflow Order

While each tool works independently, using them in the right sequence produces the best results. The recommended order is:

1. Generate — Start by creating your base image using any of the AI generation models (Flux, Mystic, Recraft, etc.) or by sourcing a stock photo.
2. Upscale — Increase the resolution first. This gives all subsequent tools more detail to work with and ensures the final output is high-resolution.
3. Relight — Adjust the lighting on the high-resolution image. Relighting works better on detailed images because the AI has more visual information to analyze when determining how light should interact with surfaces.
4. Style Transfer — Apply artistic styling after the image is high-resolution and properly lit. The style transfer will have better source material to work with, producing cleaner and more detailed artistic results.
5. Expand — Extend the canvas last. Since the center image is now upscaled, relit, and styled, the AI can generate expanded areas that match the quality and aesthetic of the processed image.

This order ensures each step builds on the improvements of the previous one. However, you do not need to use all four tools every time — use only the ones your image needs.

Practical Workflow Example

Let's walk through a complete example: creating a professional hero banner for a website.

1. Generate: Use Flux 2 Pro to generate a portrait of a professional woman in a modern office. The base image is 1024x1024.
2. Upscale: Run the image through Upscale to boost it to approximately 4096x4096. Now you have a high-resolution base with sharp details in the face, clothing, and background.
3. Relight: The generated image has standard flat lighting. Use Relight to add warm, directional lighting from the left side, creating professional studio-quality lighting with soft shadows.
4. Style Transfer: You want a specific brand aesthetic. Provide a reference image of your company's existing photography style. The AI applies the same color grading, contrast, and mood to your image, making it match the existing brand.
5. Expand: The image is square, but you need a 16:9 banner. Use Expand with the prompt "continuation of the modern office environment, blurred background, soft bokeh lights" to extend the canvas horizontally. Now you have a widescreen banner with the subject well-positioned and a naturally extended background.

The result is a high-resolution, professionally lit, brand-consistent, properly formatted hero banner — created entirely with AI tools in FP AI Studio.

When to Use Which Tool

• Image is too small → Upscale
• Lighting is flat or wrong mood → Relight
• Need a different visual style or brand consistency → Style Transfer
• Wrong aspect ratio or need more canvas space → Expand
• Image needs multiple improvements → Chain them in the recommended order

Combining with AI Generation

The editing tools become even more powerful when combined with the image generation capabilities of FP AI Studio. Generate an image with Flux 2 Pro, Mystic, or Recraft V3, then immediately enhance it with the editing pipeline. This two-phase approach — generate then edit — consistently produces better results than trying to get everything perfect in a single generation.

AI generation excels at creating concepts, compositions, and subjects. The editing tools excel at polishing resolution, lighting, style, and framing. Together, they give you a complete creative pipeline that handles everything from initial concept to final production-ready output, all within FP AI Studio.