Yingzao

Yingzao (营造, a classical term for the craft of building) is a skill for turning photographs of Chinese places into art-directed editorial posters. Its subjects are architecture, historic streets, cultural shops, traditional crafts and regional food — the things people photograph on a trip or in their own city and then struggle to make look as good as they felt.

It works in a deliberate sequence. First it studies your photo: its composition and, above all, its identity anchors — the roof lines, eaves, brackets, shop plaques or signature dishes that make the place recognisable and must survive any transformation. Next, before looking at any visual references, it writes a creative thesis covering four domains, so the concept comes from the place rather than from whatever reference happens to be closest. Only then does it pick one compatible reference plate from a large bundled library to set the visual register.

It also designs Chinese display lettering for the poster and draws a sparse layout guide image. The photo, the chosen reference and the layout guide are sent to your agent’s image-editing model together, and the skill performs one read-back check of the result against its own plan. It can also merge several photos of the same place into a single coherent scene, which is useful when no one shot captures the whole street.

For people who work in video, the skill can extend a finished poster into a 3×3 storyboard and write a prompt for a video model, turning a still into the plan for a short clip.

Practical notes: it needs an agent that supports skills and image editing, and it runs local preparation scripts and a dependency check on first use. The skill lives in the yingzao folder of the repository and installs with the skills CLI. The repository has no licence file, so its author — who also made the Guizang social card and slides skills — keeps all rights; use it for your own work and ask before redistributing it or its reference library.