Image Styles & Custom Styles

Every image Rankturn generates — thumbnails, in-article illustrations — is rendered in a style. You pick a style once and it gives all of your images a consistent look. Rankturn ships with 30+ built-in preset styles, and on paid plans you can also create your own custom style tuned to your brand.

Styles are configured under Settings > Generation Settings, in the Image Styles area. To learn how images are produced inside an article, see Images, Diagrams, Screenshots & Videos.

Preset Styles Overview

Preset styles are grouped into two categories that describe what kind of imagery they produce:

When you open the style picker, the options are listed under these two headings so you can quickly find the right feel. Each preset shows its name and a short description.

A few things worth knowing:

• Each style carries its own art direction. A style isn't just a label — it bundles a detailed visual recipe (medium, color treatment, lighting, texture) plus guidance that steers what subjects the AI chooses. For example, classical styles like Oil Painting and Sumi-e steer away from modern objects (smartphones, screens, UI), while line styles render on a clean white background.
• No text in images. Preset (and custom) styles always produce purely visual images with no text, letters, or watermarks baked in. Title text on thumbnails is added afterward in a separate layout step, not drawn into the image itself.
• The default style is Flat Design. If your chosen style ever becomes unavailable, Rankturn falls back to Flat Design so your images keep generating without interruption.

Creating a Custom Style (4-Step Wizard)

If none of the presets match your brand, the custom-style wizard generates a bespoke style from your brand inputs. It walks through four stages:

1. Brand input. Describe what you want. You can set:

   • Visual type — Scene or Abstract (same two categories as the presets).
   • Brand colors — up to 5 colors, or let the AI choose colors automatically.
   • Preference keywords — up to 10 mood/aesthetic keywords (e.g. "minimal", "playful").
   • Notes — free-text guidance for the AI.
   • Reference image (optional) — upload an image to base the style on (see the next section).
   • Approach & number of candidates — how many style options to generate at once.

2. Candidates. The AI generates one or more style candidates and renders a preview image for each so you can judge the actual look, not just a description. Each candidate has a name, description, and the design movements that inspired it.

3. Refine. Not quite right? Pick a candidate and give feedback in plain language (e.g. "warmer colors", "less busy"). The AI revises the style and renders a fresh preview, keeping the same test subject so you compare apples to apples. You can refine repeatedly.

4. Confirm. When a candidate looks right, save it. The confirmed style is added to your library and becomes selectable anywhere a preset style is, alongside the built-ins.

You can create multiple custom styles and duplicate an existing one as a starting point. Duplicating a saved style does not consume any tokens.

Stabilized Styles & Reference Images

Two features help your images look like a coherent family rather than a set of one-offs:

Reference images (brand input). In step 1 you can upload a reference image. Rankturn looks at that image and picks up its actual look — color, medium, texture, composition — then builds the custom style to match it. You can choose a faithful approach (stay close to the uploaded image) or a hybrid approach (blend the reference with a complementary design movement for fresh variations). This is the way to turn an existing brand visual into a reusable Rankturn style. Your uploads are private — only images from your own account can be used.

Stabilization. After you confirm a style, you can stabilize it. Stabilization generates a few extra reference images anchored to your style's preview, so future article images stay visually consistent with that look across many generations. If your chosen article image style can't be stabilized on its own, Rankturn automatically handles it for you so stabilized generations still work.

Token Quota for Custom Styles

Creating and refining custom styles consumes style tokens from a monthly (billing-period) quota. The quota depends on your plan:

Custom styles are a paid feature — they are unavailable on the Free state and the Text plan. See Plan Details and Usage Quotas for the full picture.

How tokens are spent:

• Generating candidates costs one token per candidate. Asking for more candidates at once uses more tokens.
• Refining a candidate costs one token.
• Stabilizing a confirmed style costs one token.
• Previewing a self-authored style (rendering a preview while you write the prompt yourself) costs 1 token — or 2 tokens if a thumbnail-frame preview is rendered at the same time.
• Saving a self-authored style (writing the prompt yourself, with no preview render) and duplicating a saved style do not consume tokens.

If a step would exceed your quota, Rankturn stops before generating and tells you the limit was reached. If generation fails after a token is reserved, that token is refunded so you are never charged for a failed run.

Where Styles Apply

Your selected style is applied across the image types in an article:

In short: pick or build the style once, and it governs the look of your thumbnails and inline images. Diagrams are handled separately because they need accurate labels and structure rather than an artistic treatment. For more on each image type, see Images, Diagrams, Screenshots & Videos. To set your image style as the default for new articles, use Generation Settings.