Prompt-based inpainting vs traditional Photoshop for vehicle photo retouching & mockups - what's your workflow?

[ethanjamescolez]

Hey everyone,

Wanted to open a discussion here in Graphic Manipulation on how you guys approach quick photo retouching, background cleanup, and concept mockups for automotive photography these days.

Traditionally, whenever I had to clean up a garage photo, remove harsh reflections, take out background clutter (distracting street signs, poles, photobombs), or test subtle visual tweaks on a car shot, the standard route was opening Photoshop or GIMP, manually masking with pen/lasso tools, clone stamping, and healing layer by layer. It gives pixel-level precision, but it can be quite time-consuming for quick mockups.

Recently I've been experimenting with prompt-guided web inpainting tools (like AI Photo Editor on imgphotoeditor.ai and similar lightweight inpainting editors) where you brush over the unwanted area or background element and describe the desired change in plain text (e.g., removing distracting reflections or isolating vehicle silhouettes). For quick turnaround mockups and photo cleanup, it definitely cuts down prep time, though traditional layered editing is still unmatched for high-res detail work.

For those of you doing automotive renders, chops, and photo edits: are you incorporating any prompt-based AI or inpainting workflows into your pipeline, or do you still stick strictly to manual Photoshop layers and masking? What does your typical editing stack look like right now?