How far a free photo app gets you, and where the image stops being sellable

• Cropping and reframing, so the product sits centred and in the aspect ratio your sales channel wants.

• Brightness and contrast, pulling a photo shot in a dim room back to something readable.

• Colour-matching a whole set so it reads as one shop, which does more for a storefront than one individually beautiful photo.

• Background removal on straightforward images, such as a dark garment on a light surface where the edge already contrasts with what is behind it.

If everything you need is on that list, you do not need to pay us, and we do not think you should. Background removal here costs 1 credit per image. If the app you already use gives you a clean edge, spending a credit for the same outcome makes no sense. The limits are the same for every cutout tool, ours included: very complex edges such as flyaway hair or sheer fabric may not cut cleanly everywhere, and a product close in colour to its background is always harder to separate.

Editing tools work on pixels that are already in the file. A filter computes a new colour value for a point that exists. Sharpening increases contrast along an edge that exists. Background removal decides which existing points to keep and which to drop. None of the three adds a single piece of new information to the image. Now ask this of your flat-lay photo: what does the inside of the collar look like? The file simply does not contain that information. No slider will produce it, because the job is not adjusting the value of a point that exists — it is drawing points that never existed.

• A photo of someone wearing the garment, when there was no person in the source photo at all. The person, the pose and the way the fabric falls on a body must all be drawn from nothing.

• A flat garment holding its worn shape, which requires guessing what the inside of the collar and the thickness of the fabric look like, from a photo that shows neither.

• The back of the garment, when you only photographed the front.

• A new setting that is not your living-room floor. Not the product pasted onto another backdrop, but the light of that setting falling convincingly on the product itself.

Plenty of photo apps now hold both things at once: the familiar adjustment sliders, and a button that draws a new image for you. So the line is not the name of the app or its price, it is which kind of work the button you pressed is doing. And once something is drawing a new image, the questions are the same for every provider — including us. Here are our own answers to all five.

• Do the print and the lettering on the garment stay as they are? Our product-to-model and ghost mannequin tools carry an instruction pinning the print artwork, the lettering and its spelling on every run, but how well that holds depends mostly on how sharp the photo you upload is.

• Does it invent a brand tag that is not on the product? Ours is instructed not to, and while choosing tools we dropped a cheaper option because it fabricated a brand tag on the collar despite an explicit instruction not to.

• Do the shape and the colour drift from the real item? We pin the silhouette, neckline, hemline and fabric texture. Colour sometimes comes back slightly lighter than the real garment, particularly on ghost mannequin.

• Is the output watermarked, and may it be listed for sale? On our free plan your first image has no watermark, but every image after it carries a watermark burned into the file itself, so it cannot be removed and the image cannot be listed. Paid plans have no watermark.

• Does a second run give the same result? Ours does not. The output is probabilistic, the same photo run twice will not be identical, and some jobs need another run.

A sharpen slider works on edges that are already in the file. It raises contrast along those edges until your eye reads the image as crisper, but detail the camera never captured still is not there. We do sell an upscaler, at 1 credit per image, which makes a file larger without it falling apart — and our own help centre says plainly that it does not add detail that was not in the source. On fine fabrics such as lace, our upscaler removed the pattern and replaced it with a smooth raised texture, which is worse than the original. The blunt conclusion: if the photo was blurred to begin with, no tool, free or paid, takes you back to detail that was never recorded.

• Background removal: 1 credit per image.

• Upscale: 1 credit per image.

• Try-on: 2 credits per image, at a single quality level.

• Product to model: 2 credits per image at standard quality, 5 at premium.

• Ghost mannequin: 2 credits per image at standard quality and 4 at premium.

• On product to model only, picking a scene, a pose or styling pieces is charged as a step rather than one by one: one or two of them together add 1 credit, three or more add 2. Picking a model from the system library adds 1 further credit on standard quality only. The screen shows the total before you press generate.

Signing up gives you 10 free credits, once, with no card required — enough to find out whether your products suit the system. One thing to know before you spend them: your first image on the free plan has no watermark, but every image after it carries our watermark burned into the file itself, not laid over the screen, so it cannot be removed and the image cannot be listed for sale. The free plan is there to let you judge the quality, not to do real work with.

• The output is probabilistic. The same photo run twice will not be identical, whereas a slider in an app gives the same result every time. If you need results you can reproduce exactly, that is a genuine drawback.

• Lettering on garments is still a weak point for us, especially Thai script and small type. If the text on the shirt is the selling point, zoom in and check every frame before listing.

• Colour sometimes comes back slightly lighter than the real garment. If colour is what closes the sale, compare against the physical item every time.

• You still have to photograph the product yourself at least once. There is no shortcut past that, and how sharp that photo is sets the ceiling on the result.

• It needs an account and runs in a browser, unlike an app on your phone that opens and edits immediately with no connection.