Every serious house writes a condition report before a piece is offered: a short, honest account of what is sound, what is flawed, and what the flaws mean for the work ahead. AI creators skip this step entirely. A frame comes back glowing on a phone screen, finishing credits get spent on it, and only at full size — after the upscale, after the cover is built — do the melted earring and the seventh finger report for duty. The report takes ninety seconds. Written at intake, it decides where credits go; skipped, it decides where they went.
The five checks, in order
1. Composition at thumbnail size. Shrink the frame until it is the size it will be in a feed. If the subject does not read instantly — one figure, one gesture, one light direction — no amount of detail will save it. Composition failures are regeneration verdicts, not restoration ones.
2. The face against the entry. Compare her to the catalogue entry, anchor by anchor: hair, build, face details, signature item. A frame can be beautiful and still be off-entry, and off-entry frames are the ones that quietly break a series. If the face has drifted, the verdict is a face swap with the reference portrait, or the cull pile.
3. Hands, jewellery, edges. Zoom to 100% and inspect the known weak points: fingers, earrings, necklace clasps, hairlines against busy backgrounds. Single small artefacts are restoration work — one brief, one fix. Artefacts everywhere mean the frame was over-briefed; note it in the report and regenerate simpler.
4. Light honesty. Does the light come from one believable source, and do the shadows agree with it? Mixed light is the flaw viewers feel without naming. A grade pass on the editor can unify mild cases; contradictory shadows are a regenerate.
5. The finish line. Only now ask the money question: what will this frame be used for? A day-wall post needs no more work. A cover lot earns restoration and an upscale. The report ends with one of three verdicts — hang as-is, restore then hang, cull — and the verdict is written down with the frame, so next month’s you knows why this piece was treated the way it was.
Why the paper matters
A condition report is really a memory device. Series run for months; the reasons behind a hundred small decisions evaporate in a week. The creators whose walls stay consistent are not the ones with the best eye — they are the ones whose reports let any given frame be re-judged, identically, at any later date. Ninety seconds of writing is what separates a collection from a pile of pictures.