37 colorway edits of one product photo: about $2.06 on gpt-image-2.5

Thirty-seven colorway edits of one product photo on Sume's gpt-image-2.5 cost about $2.06 at the medium 2K list price: 37 times $0.055625 is $2.058. The model edits with up to 16 image references and an optional mask_url, so the product shape can stay while the color changes. Confirm the edit price in the catalog, because tiers depend on quality and size.

The setup

Send the original photo as the first input reference, a mask_url that covers only the area to recolor, and a prompt that names the new color exactly, such as the strap in forest green, nothing else changed. Reference URLs must be public HTTPS. On edit calls use aspect_ratio auto to match the source image; leaving it out is not the same.

The model accepts quality auto, low, medium, high, xhigh and max, with high as the default if you omit it, so set quality medium on purpose or the bill is higher.

Keeping the product honest

A colorway image must match what you ship. Generated edits can drift in stitching, logo placement or texture, and a customer who receives a different color than pictured returns it. Inspect every edit against the real product, and only publish colors that exist.

Use a mask so the model has less room to wander, and reuse the same prompt skeleton with one color word changed. Keep the original photo reference identical across all 37 calls.

Batch it

Submit calls in parallel with an idempotency key per color so a retry does not create a duplicate, and read each result from the job's artifacts. A low-quality pass at $0.92 for all 37 tells you which colors work before you pay for medium on the winners.

A practical note

Two checks save money. First, run three colors at medium before you queue all 37, and compare each against the product swatch under neutral light. Second, name colors the way your store does, because a prompt that says teal and a listing that says petrol will not match in a customer's mind. The cost of a wrong batch is the full $2.06 plus the time to find which edits drifted, so a three-color pilot at about $0.17 is cheap insurance. Store the final files with the color name in the file name so your catalog import maps them without guessing.

Before you scale

Every price in this post is a Sume list price read from the public catalog on 2026-10-09, and the arithmetic is shown so you can redo it with your own counts. Rates can change, so re-read the catalog before a large batch and run a small test first. Sume bills the job's captured amount, and the job result tells you what was used, so compare the first run's receipt with your estimate before you scale the work to the full set.