How Estúdio Salgada Recolors a Background in Minutes

It is a Tuesday morning in Alfama and Mariana Salgada has four hours before a 2 p.m. pitch with a boutique olive oil brand. On her worktable: a single base concept generated overnight. On her screen: eight empty palette directions she has promised the client. A year ago, this Tuesday would have been unsalvageable.

Estúdio Salgada is a three-person independent design studio in Lisbon, serving boutique brands across packaging, identity, and editorial work. Mariana founded it in 2022 after eight years in São Paulo agencies. The studio's reputation is built on color — specifically, on showing clients more palette directions than competing studios bother to produce. Until recently, that reputation cost the team most of its nights.

When the team moved its concept-stage color exploration onto Playyy's AI Image Editor, the math of a pitch changed.

The studio now shows eight palette directions in the time it used to show two. That single shift — driven by the editable canvas where every element and background recolors instantly — pushed the studio's pitch acceptance rate from roughly one-in-four to nearly one-in-two across the first quarter of 2026.

Why the Old Palette-Exploration Workflow Broke

The previous workflow had three stages, and the failure was always in the middle stage.

Mariana's team generated a base concept in Figma using flat vector compositions, then exported each element into Illustrator for color exploration. Each new palette direction meant re-tinting individual shapes, manually adjusting accent colors, and re-exporting back into a Figma frame for the pitch deck. A single palette direction took roughly 80 minutes from clean comp to pitch-ready frame.

Eight directions, multiplied across two product shots per direction, came out to roughly 11 hours of dedicated palette work for a single pitch. The studio rarely had 11 hours. So pitches usually went out with two or three palette directions — enough to demonstrate range, not enough to give clients the feeling of having genuinely explored the brand's color space.

The studio tracked one number that captured the problem: their pitch-to-win ratio sat at 24% across 2024 and the first half of 2025. Clients liked the work. They just did not commit to a palette they had not seen.

According to the Adobe 2024 Creative Trends Report, 73% of designers cite "rapid iteration on color and composition" as a workflow capability where current tools fall short. Estúdio Salgada's experience matched that data exactly: the bottleneck was never the idea, it was the cost of re-rendering the idea in seven slightly different colors.

The Launch Upgrade: An Editable Canvas Where Every Element Recolors Instantly

Playyy's AI Image Editor launched in May 2026 alongside the existing AI Image Generator, Background Remover, and Object Eraser. The new layer brought what generative-only tools could not — a fully editable canvas with recolor, swap, layered masking, outpaint, inpaint, restyle, and text editing.

For Estúdio Salgada, the relevant capability was the recolor system. On the editable canvas, the background lives as its own masked region. Selecting it and applying a new color does not flatten the comp or break the subject's lighting — it re-renders the background pixels while preserving the subject's shading, shadow cast, and ambient color bounce. The same logic applies to any accent element in the composition.

That meant the studio could finally treat palette exploration as a single decision tree rather than a series of rebuilds. Generate the base concept once. Duplicate. Recolor. Repeat. Each palette direction took roughly nine minutes instead of 80.

"We stopped designing the same comp eight times. The comp is the comp. The palette is a switch." — Mariana Salgada, Creative Director

The Six-Step Palette-Exploration Workflow

The studio formalized its new process into a six-step pitch-stage workflow. It runs the same way for packaging, identity, and editorial briefs.

1. Brief intake and palette hypothesis. Mariana writes 6-8 palette directions on paper before opening any software — terracotta, sage green, navy, blush, deep burgundy, dusty cobalt, ochre, off-black. The list comes from the brand's positioning, not from sampling existing work.

2. Base concept generation. The team uses Playyy's AI Image Generator to produce one foundational composition in a neutral palette. This becomes the master comp. For the Tuesday olive oil pitch, that meant a single bottle in studio lighting against a soft warm background.

3. Duplicate to eight working files. Each working file inherits the same composition. No re-rendering, no re-prompting — the master comp is the source of truth across all eight directions.

4. Recolor the background and the accent. Using the editable canvas, the background region is selected and recolored to the target palette. The bottle label and any secondary element follow. Because the canvas adapts surface lighting to the new color cast, the recolor reads as photographic rather than flat-filled.

5. Refine each variant individually. Some palettes need micro-adjustments — a sage green background sometimes needs the label to shift two shades warmer to maintain hierarchy. The team applies these tweaks in 60-90 seconds per variant using Style Transfer for tone consistency across the set.

6. Export the pitch deck. All eight variants export at the same resolution into a single Figma frame for client review. Total time on the Tuesday pitch: 90 minutes from blank canvas to deck-ready file.

For a related approach to color-led brand decisions, see the studio's reference guide on building a sage green color story.

How Concept-Pitch Outcomes Have Changed

The studio kept the same client roster, the same brief intake process, and the same pricing structure. The only variable they changed was the palette-exploration phase. The outcome differences are documented in their internal pitch log.

Pitch acceptance rate moved from 24% (2024-H1 2025) to 47% (Q1 2026). Revision rounds after the initial palette commitment dropped from an average of 3.4 to 1.2 per project. Average project timeline from pitch acceptance to delivery shortened by 12 working days, primarily because clients chose a direction faster and stuck with it.

The mechanism, in Mariana's reading, is straightforward. A client shown three palettes feels they are being asked to pick between three known options. A client shown eight feels they are being given the entire color space and asked which corner of it the brand lives in. The decision shifts from comparison to commitment.

According to Designmodo's 2025 client-pitch survey, studios that present more than five concept directions report a 31% higher first-round acceptance rate than studios that present three or fewer. Estúdio Salgada's data sits comfortably inside that pattern.

For studios coming from a Photoshop-heavy workflow, the migration path is documented in this Photopea alternatives breakdown, which covers where browser-based editors now match or exceed desktop tools for brand work.

The Studio's Broader Workflow Shift

Estúdio Salgada has not stopped using Photoshop. What changed is the phase of the project where Photoshop appears.

Through 2024 and most of 2025, Photoshop sat at the center of the studio's pitch-stage workflow. It was where palette explorations happened, where comps got rebuilt, where accent colors were tested. That phase now lives entirely on the AI editable canvas. Photoshop returns at finishing — high-resolution print preparation for packaging mockups, complex layered compositing for editorial spreads, retouch on photography assets the client provides.

The studio also retired its old Figma-to-Illustrator-to-Figma export loop for concept work. The base comp and all eight palette variants now live in a single editable file, with elements that recolor non-destructively. When a client at the pitch asks "what does this look like in dusty cobalt?" — a question that used to mean "send us a revised deck Thursday" — the answer is now a 90-second adjustment on the screen in front of them.

Two other Playyy tools have moved into the studio's regular workflow alongside recoloring: Inpaint Replace for swapping label elements during pitches when the client wants to see an alternative typeface treatment, and Split Layers for isolating product elements from generated comps so accent recoloring can happen independently of the background palette change.

For studios considering this kind of transition, the more general principles are covered in this brand identity guide, which works through the difference between exploring color at the concept stage versus locking it at the production stage.

What the Pitch Process Looks Like Now

The Tuesday olive oil brand pitched at 2 p.m. went well. The client picked the dusty cobalt direction at 2:34 p.m., 34 minutes into the meeting, and signed the engagement letter on the studio's standard terms by Thursday afternoon. Two of the other seven palette directions were saved into the project file for use in seasonal campaign extensions.

Mariana's pitch calendar through the rest of 2026 looks different than it did a year earlier. The studio takes on four pitch meetings per week instead of two. The team's overtime hours dropped sharply once the 11-hour palette-exploration block disappeared. New client conversations now start with the question Mariana wants — "which of these palette directions feels like the brand?" — rather than the question the old workflow forced — "is this close enough to what you imagined?"

The studio's positioning has shifted in step with the workflow. Estúdio Salgada now markets itself, in its first conversations with prospective clients, as a studio that arrives at the pitch with the full palette space already explored. That positioning was previously aspirational. It is now an accurate description of how a Tuesday morning runs.