User guide

Everything is in the sidebar, and the order is roughly the order you need it in.

• Dashboard — what you have, what you have used, and what is running right now.
• Products — everything you sell, gathered from every connected store.
• Shoots — work you have started and not published yet.
• Models and Backgrounds — the people your catalogue is shot on, and where the shot takes place.
• Connections — the stores and channels your catalogue lives on. Setting one up is covered in the installation guide.
• Customer try-on — letting shoppers see your clothes on themselves, on your own product pages.
• Plans — what each plan includes, and what you have used of yours.

The short version of a first session: make a model, describe a background, open a product in the Studio, and press Go live on the frame you like.

Generation is metered in tokens. Every plan includes an allowance, and nothing is charged per photograph on top of it — you spend the allowance, and the plan says how large it is.

The app quotes a cost before you spend it. Each generate button says what the run will take, so the decision is made before the money rather than after. A run that fails is refunded to your balance; a run that succeeds is charged whether or not you keep the result, because producing it has already cost us.

The Products screen lists everything from every connected store in one place, with a search across the lot. Softbox reads these from your store; it does not keep a second catalogue of its own.

You can also create a product here — a name, a description, a price and some images — when you want to shoot something that is not listed yet. Those are marked as created here, and when you are ready you choose which connected platform to create them on.

Update Catalog pushes changes for the products you have selected. It tells you how many were updated and how many had nothing to publish, so a run that did nothing is visibly a run that did nothing.

To shoot something, select it and press Shoot. That opens the Studio on that product.

A model is a person you make once and reuse. This is the part that turns a pile of photographs into a catalogue: forty products on one model look like a brand, and forty products on forty strangers look like a marketplace.

Describe the person with the fields — gender, age, skin tone, body type, height, face shape, hair style and colour, eye colour, expression, and a notes field for anything else that should be true of them. Softbox generates them on plain grey and keeps the result as a reference your shots are built from.

• A reference image is optional. Drop one in to steer the result, or leave it and generate from the description alone.
• Headless models are generated neck-down, with the face cropped out. Useful when the garment is the subject and a face is a distraction — or when you would rather not publish a generated face at all.
• A photograph used as a model has to show a person. Softbox checks, and says so if it does not, because a flat-lay garment makes no sense as a model and the failure would otherwise be a confusing result rather than a clear refusal.

How many models you may keep depends on your plan. Deleting one frees the slot immediately.

A background is a sentence: warm cream plaster, daylight from the left. Describe the setting in plain words — that description is what the image model reads — and the scene becomes something you can reuse on anything.

It is applied after the garment has been fitted to the model, which is why changing your mind about the room is cheap: it is one short step, not a reshoot. As with models, a reference image is optional and plan limits apply to how many you keep.

One product, explored. The Studio is where a model, a background and your product photograph become a catalogue shot.

1. Pick a model. Nothing can happen before this, so the Studio asks for it first.
2. Choose a background, or leave it and get the model on plain grey.
3. Optionally pair the product with others — trousers and a jacket alongside a shirt. They are fitted one after another, on the same body, in order.
4. Press Generate. The button says what it will cost. You will see it fitting the garment, then placing the scene.

From there it is a conversation with the picture. Ask for a change takes plain instructions — warmer light, look to camera, slight smile — and Improve this prompt will rewrite your wording into something the model reads better, with an undo if you preferred your own.

• Change one part only. Drag across the image to mark an area, and your instruction applies to that region alone. Clear the marked area to go back to changing the whole frame.
• Sharpen recovers detail lost in processing. It quotes its own token cost, like everything else.
• Regenerate runs it again from the same setup, for when the result is nearly right and you want another roll.

Keep the frames you want. You can download a single image or all of them at once, whether or not you publish.

Go live writes the frames you kept to the product in your own store — same listing, same URL, new photographs. Softbox does not become a second place your catalogue lives.

This is the only action that changes anything in your shop, and it needs the write permission you granted when you connected the store. Give the platform a minute afterwards: most process an image upload in the background, and some add new images to the end of the gallery rather than the front.

Published photographs are yours. They stay on your listings and stay yours if you stop paying, as the terms say.

Work you have started and not published yet. Set a product up in the Studio and it waits here — what you paired, what you kept — so closing a tab is not the same as losing an afternoon. Removing something from this list does not touch your store.

This one is not about your catalogue. Turning it on adds a Try on button under Add to Cart on every product page, and shoppers upload or take a photo and see the garment on themselves.

It costs you tokens, not the shopper: every try-on is a fitting plus a check that the photo shows a person, and the app tells you the exact cost before you enable it. Because the bill is yours, the limits are worth setting first.

• Who gets one — guests, signed-in customers, or both. Guests can be asked for an email address or a newsletter sign-up first, or nothing at all, in which case they are counted by browser and address.
• How many — per guest, per customer, per product or across the whole shop, with a cap on how many the shop gives away in a day and a cooldown between tries.
• Who has earned it — a minimum spend or number of completed orders before any try-on, and extra try-ons for customers who have spent more.

Every rule is checked on our side on each request, so a shopper cannot get around one by reloading. Widget design controls how the button and its window look in your storefront.

A plan sets three things: the tokens included, how many models you may keep, and how many backgrounds. The Plans screen shows what each includes against what you have used.

Unused tokens do not carry into the next period. Dropping to a smaller plan does not delete anything you have made, but it may stop you making more until you are back under the limit — so deleting a model you have finished with is how you free a slot.

Settings holds your details, how you sign in, and how the app behaves. You can change your display name, change your email or password, or add a password to an account that arrived through Google or a store platform and has never had one.

Deleting your account removes your profile, your models, your backgrounds, your store connection and every image Softbox generated for you. It cannot be undone, and photographs already published to your own store stay there, because they are yours. The privacy policy sets out exactly what goes and what is kept.

Anything this page does not answer, write to info@codinative.com.