EASELWhy it is still your face
Every look in Easel is a paragraph of instructions. Most of it describes a medium: the paint, the light, the surface it sits on. The last few lines are about the face, and they exist because the rest of the paragraph, left to itself, takes the face with it.
An image model will happily turn a photograph into an oil painting. It will also, asked on its own, keep the person in the photograph recognisable. Put both instructions in one paragraph and they start fighting, because the model rewrites the whole image in one pass. There is no separate layer holding the face.
The failure we kept hitting
The obvious way to protect a likeness is to tell the model to leave things alone: preserve the colours, the shadows, the background layout, do not move anything. That is what we wrote first, and it ruins the picture.
What comes back is a retouched photograph. The model has been told that its job is to change as little as possible, so it changes as little as possible, and you have spent a credit on a slightly warmer version of the picture you already had.
Scoping the protection
The fix was to stop protecting the whole image and protect only the part that has to survive. Every Easel look ends with a clause about the face, and the painted looks get the version that names exactly what may not move: the face, feature by feature — the same proportions, the same expression, the same apparent age, the same skin tone, the same hair. Where several people are in frame, each keeps their own complexion rather than drifting toward one another. The pose, the count of people and objects, and the overall composition stay put.
And then it says the opposite about everything else. Surface, texture, line, light and palette should be reinterpreted fully and confidently in the medium the look describes. Render the medium wholeheartedly. A result that still looks like a photograph is a failure.
Nobody is slimmed, smoothed, lightened or idealised. That is in the clause too, and it is there because a model asked to make someone look good will quietly make them look like someone else.
Where the clause changes
Some looks cannot keep the composition, because replacing the surroundings is the whole point — you on the Moon, you underwater, you in Venice. Losing the background also removes the anchor that keeps a likeness steady, so those looks hold the person harder instead.
The Makeover looks need the opposite deal. A beard, grey hair or a pair of glasses is a change to the face, so their clause permits the one alteration you asked for and holds everything else still: the pose, the clothing, the light, down to the grain of the photograph. Someone who knows you should see the same face with one thing different, not a similar-looking stranger.
Caricature turns it around again. Exaggeration is the product there, so the clause asks for two or three features to be pushed hard, then insists the result is still obviously this person and still affectionate: nothing cruel about weight, no lightening the skin, no features added that the person does not have.
What this means when you use it
Pick the most extreme look in the catalogue, a cave painting or a clay figure, and the person in it is still recognisable — as long as the photograph you started from was a good one. The clause can only protect a face the model can see.
