Every maker keeps frames they should have retired, because the only judgement applied was a feeling. Feelings are generous after an hour of generating. A small, fixed house standard is stricter and faster: five points, checked the same way every time, against the guest card you wrote before the session began. It takes under a minute a frame, and it is the difference between a register of keepers and a corridor of maybes.
The five points
1. Likeness. Is she the guest on the card — same hair, same face, same signature — or a near relative? Judge against the card, not against the previous frame, because drift compounds quietly when each frame is only compared with its neighbour.
2. Anatomy. Hands first, then joints, then anything the pose bends. A frame can survive soft detail; it cannot survive anatomy the eye trips over at thumbnail size.
3. Light. One source, behaving consistently across skin, fabric and background. Light that disagrees with itself is the most common reason a strong frame feels vaguely wrong.
4. Edges. Hair against background, fingers against props, lace against skin. Clean edges are what let a frame sit beside others in a set without announcing how it was made.
5. Purpose. Does the frame do the one job it was briefed for — the cover, the teaser, the quiet filler? A beautiful frame that does the wrong job scores low here, and rightly.
The threshold that saves money
Score each point out of two: fails, passes, strong. A frame needs eight of ten to earn finishing spend — an edit at 21 credits, a swap at 26, an upscale at 61. Below eight, the frame goes back to the generator at the 6-credit standard cost, where correction is cheapest. The standard is not about being harsh; it is about spending the expensive credits only where the portrait already holds. Keep the scores with the set, dated. A month later they will tell you which of your habits actually improved — recorded, not remembered. Makers who judge honestly for a single month usually find the pattern quickly: one point, most often light or edges, accounts for nearly every retired frame, and fixing that one habit lifts the whole register more than any new setting ever will.