The Directors

Box Director and the other tools for zone-based composition

What Ideogram, Phosphene, Invoke, Recraft and Krea offer for placing things in an image, and what Box Director does on top.

Several AI tools today let you place elements in an image by zones: Ideogram 4.0 reads boxes from a JSON prompt, Phosphene adds a box canvas for Ideogram 4, Invoke offers regional guidance layers on its canvas. The Box Director from Axiris brings together on one board what is not found together anywhere else: freezing what is right so that it comes back to the pixel, placing the exact without redrawing it, one model per zone, and layouts that you place on the next image.

Placing, or building

The idea of directing an image by zones is no longer rare. Several tools let you tell the model where to put an object or a text. The difference comes afterwards: what happens on the next render, what is redrawn, what is kept.

The other tools give you boxes to place. Box Director gives you boxes to build: what is validated no longer moves.

Survey made on 2 November 2026, from the publishers' public pages. Tools change fast; this page will be updated.

What the others offer

Ideogram 4.0. Released as open weights in June 2026, the model reads boxes from a JSON prompt to place each object and each text. Placement is described by coordinates in the prompt. Ideogram's Studio treats each element as a layer; its texts remain editable, and a beta feature rebuilds the text of an image into editable layers.

Phosphene. A desktop application added a composition canvas for Ideogram 4 in June 2026: text and object boxes on a sheet, and a programming interface that receives the scene and its boxes. It is the closest gesture to the Axiris board.

Invoke. Free and local, its canvas offers regional guidance layers: one mask per zone, with its instruction and its reference image, and retouching on the same surface.

Recraft. Working frames and zone-based retouching; according to its documentation, retouching works best on images of 1024 pixels or less, larger ones being downsized before editing.

Krea. Zone-based retouching in Krea 2 goes through add-on modules for ComfyUI: you black out the zone and describe what should appear there.

What Box Director brings together

Taken one by one, some of these gestures exist elsewhere. Brought together on a single board, we have found them nowhere:

  • Freeze. What is right becomes a locked layer: change the scene, run again, it comes back identical to the pixel.
  • Place the exact. A title is set to the pixel in the chosen typeface, a logo is placed in perspective, engraved or embossed. The model never redraws them.
  • One model per zone. Place an object, transform a material, edit while keeping the person, enhance the material: the choice is made zone by zone. On a text, fire goes into the letters without changing their shape.
  • Start from your photo. The boxes edit your image; outside the zones, nothing moves.
  • The layout. The composition is saved and placed on the next image: a poster is built once, then declined into variants.

Box Director is used in the axiris.ai interface; you receive the image, the recipe stays with Axiris. The step-by-step guide: Box Director.

Sources

Ideogram, text and layers · Phosphene 3.2 · Recraft, inpainting in frames · Invoke · Krea 2, zone-based retouching in ComfyUI

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