Change prices on a chalkboard menu photo with Ideogram 4.5

To change prices on a chalkboard menu photo, send the photo to ideogram/ideogram-v4.5 as the first reference and list each change as old text and new text in the prompt: change 8.50 to 9.00 on the soup line, change 12 to 13 on the burger line. On Sume, a medium edit costs $0.075 and a high edit $0.275. Ideogram describes 4.5 as its most precise edit model and shows text modification examples on its model page.

Digits are small and look alike, so the work is the check. A menu with one wrong price is worse than a menu with an old price.

Make the change list explicit

Do not say update the prices. List the line, the old text and the new text for every change, and say that every other line stays exactly as written. If five prices change, you can send them in one call, but the more changes per call the more chances for a slip, so keep a call to three or four changes and do the rest in a second call from the original.

Quote the new text exactly, including currency symbols, decimal separators and spacing. If the board uses a hand-lettered style, say that new numbers should match the chalk style and size of the existing numbers.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/images \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "ideogram/ideogram-v4.5",
    "prompt": "On this chalkboard menu change the soup price from 8.50 to 9.00 and the burger price from 12 to 13. Match the chalk lettering. Every other line, drawing and the board frame stay exactly the same.",
    "input_references": [
      {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": "https://example.com/menu-board.jpg"}}
    ],
    "quality": "high"
  }'

Quality tier for small text

Chalk lettering is thin and irregular, which is hard to render. The Sume prices make the trade-off simple to compute: a high-quality edit is $0.275, 3.67 times the medium price of $0.075. For small price numbers on a busy board, high is often worth it; for a clean, large title, medium is enough.

Digit check

Read every price against your list, line by line, at full size. Check that no price moved to another line, that a decimal point did not disappear, and that unchanged lines still say what they said. Compare the dish names, since a model that renders new numbers sometimes alters nearby words.

A completed edit is billed whether or not it is right, and a failed job is not billed. Budget one rerun per board as a working assumption and measure your actual rate in a pilot. Because there is no seed on Sume, a rerun gives a new result, not the same result with a fix.

Photos that make this harder

Glare on a glass-fronted board, an angle that distorts the numbers, or handwriting that crosses lines all make a price update harder. Take the replacement photo straight on, in even light, and with the board filling the frame. If you cannot, test at high first.

Also decide up front what the edit should do with unchanged lines. The safest instruction is that every unchanged line stays pixel-for-pixel. In practice some drift happens, so compare each unchanged line at full size too. Ideogram's own page says 4.5 reduces drift across multi-turn edits, which is useful for the first pass; do not chain a second price change on top of the first, start again from the original photo with the combined list.

When to skip the model

If the menu is a design file, edit the text in the design file. A photograph of a board is the case where a model helps, because you cannot re-photograph the board every time a price changes. If you can, keep a clean photo of the board with the prices wiped off and render prices on top in your own software, which gives you exact digits every time.