brand-media-pipelinelisted

# Brand media pipeline Getting real, good-looking imagery onto a site — cheaply, and without shipping assets that expire. --- ## 1. Do it locally and free before you spend a credit The default that saved real money: **a hero portrait cutout was produced locally, for free, rather than through a paid generation service.** | Job | Free / local first | Paid generation only if | |---|---|---| | Remove a background | local `rembg` / a segmentation model | the subject is genuinely un-segmentable | | Crop, resize, recolour | Pillow / ImageMagick / `sharp` | never | | Upscale | local upscaler | quality is visibly insufficient | | A photo that does not exist | — | **this is the real case for generation** | | Restyle an existing photo | — | when local edits can't get there | | Talking-head / avatar video | — | always paid | **Ask "can this be an edit instead of a generation?" first.** Most of what a brand site needs is an edit. Before generating anything, check the balance. Credits are finite and the owner notices. The free path, end to end — this is what replaced a paid hero-portrait generation on 26 July 2026: ```bash # 1. cut the subject out, locally, no credits python -m pip install rembg pillow python -c " from rembg import remove; from PIL import Image Image.open('portrait.jpg').convert('RGBA').save('/tmp/in.png') open('cutout.png','wb').write(remove(open('/tmp/in.png','rb').read())) " # 2. size for the slot and ship webp with alpha npx --yes sharp-cli -i cutout.png -o h