I don't think people are really sleeping on it - nano-banana more or less went viral when it first came out. I'd argue that aside from the capabilities built into ChatGPT (with the Ghibli craze and whatnot) craze it's the best known image editing model.

> That said, I am surprised Seedream 4.0 beat it in these tests.

OP here. While Seedream did have the edge in adherence it also tends to introduce slight (but noticeable) color gradation changes. It's not a huge deal for me, but it might be for other people depending on their goals in which case NanoBanana would be the better choice.

Gemini is great when it gets it right, but in my experience, it sometimes gives you completely unexpected results and won't get it right no matter what. You can see that in some of the examples (eg the Girl with the pearl earring one). I'm constantly surprised by how good Flux is, but the tragedy is most people (me included) will just default to whatever they normally use (chatgpt and gemini, in my case), so it doesn't really matter that it's better

I was trying to use gemini 2.5 flash image / nano banana to tidy up a picture of my messy kitchen. It failed horribly on my first attempt. I was quite surprised how much trouble it had with this simple task (similar to cleaning up the street in the post). On my second attempt I had it first analyze the image to point out all the items that clutter the space, and then on a second prompt had it remove all those items. That worked much better, showing how important prompt engineering is.

Seedream 4 is better than nano banana on average, so that test result seems accurate to me

No one is sleeping on nano-banana/Gemini Flash, it's highly over-tuned for editing vs novel generation and maxes out at a pretty low resolution.

Seedream 4.0 is somewhat slept on for being 4k at the same cost as nano-banana. It's not as great at perfect 1:1 edits, but it's aesthetics are much better and it's significantly more reliable in production for me.

Models with LLM backbones/omni-modal models are not rare anymore, even Qwen Image Edit is out there for open-weights.

Meh, most Google AI products look great on paper but fail in actual real scenarios. And that ranges from their Claude Code clone to their buggy storybook thing which I really wanted to like.

I am trying Qwen Image Edit for turning day photos into night, mostly architecture etc. Most models are struggling, and Nano Banana misses edges and stuff, making the pictures align poorly.

A "worst image" instead of best image competition may be easy to implement and quite indicative of which one has less frustration experience.

Yeah that's a fair critique. Your description made me laugh. Can't wait to go to a zoo exhibit featuring "AWKWARDLY BENT GIRAFFE".

> But now it seems like it is moving more and more to online hosted models.

It's mostly because image model size and required compute for both training and inference have grown faster than self-hosted compute capability for hobbyists. Sure, you can run Flux Kontext locally, but if you have to use a heavily quantized model and wait forever for the generation to actually run, the economics are harder to justify. That's not counting the "you can generate images from ChatGPT for free" factor.

> George's hair, for example, looks over the top, or brushed on.

IMO, the judge was being too generous with the passes for that test. The only one that really passes is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image:

Flux Kontext: In addition to the hair looking too slick, it does not match the VHS-esque color grading of the image.

Qwen-Image-Edit: The hair is too slick and the sharpness/saturation of the face unnecessarily increases.

Seedream 4: Color grading of the entire image changes, which is the case with most of the Seedream 4 edits shown in this post, and why I don't like it.

Thank you for the pointer. I was struggling with Nanobanana for editing an image which it had created earlier, but Reve gave me the edit result exactly the way I wanted in the first pass.

My usecase: An image of a cartoon character, holding an object and looking at it. Wanted to edit so that the character no longer has the object in her hand and now looking towards the camera.

Result Nanobanana: At first pass it only removed the object that the character was holding, however there was no change in her eyeline, she was still looking down at her now empty hand. Second prompt explicitly asked to change the eyeline to look at camera. Unsuccessful. Third attempt asked the character to look towards ceiling. Success but unusable edit as I wanted the character to look at the camera.

Result Reve: At first attempt it gave me 4 options and all 4 are usable. It not only removed the object and changed the eyeline of the character to look at the camera, but it also made posture changes so that the empty hands were appropriately positioned, and now since the character is in a different situation (sans the object that was holding her attention) Reve posed the character in different ways which were very appropriate - which I didn't think of prompting for earlier (maybe because my focus was on immediate need - object removal and change in eyeline).

On a little more digging found this writeup which will make me to signup for their product.

https://blog.reve.com/posts/reve-editing-model/

You have to REALLY be into AI to do this for generation/API cost reasons (or willing to have this as a hacking project of the month expense). Even ignoring electricity, a 16 GB 5060 Ti is more expensive than 16,000 image generations. Assuming you do one every 15 seconds, that's 240,000 seconds -> more than 2 months of usage at an hour a day of generations.

If you've already got a decent GPU (or were going to get one anyways) then cost isn't really a consideration, it's just that you can already do it. For everyone else, you can probably get by just using things like Google's AI Studio for free.

Nit: the link there was `Text-to-Image` while this is `Image Editing`

Still useful comments, as the models mostly overlap

As generative AI eats away at the high royalty, restrictive license, consent evading, stereotype reinforcing business model of stock photo companies, it will be a challenge to resist the schadenfreude.

Yeah, I couldn't help myself on that one! It's a reference to the Cypress Creek promotional video from the Simpsons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foU9W7AkKSY

Simpsons, the Frank Scorpio episode. The advertisement for the company town shows a beggar slowly fading out and being replaced by a mailbox.

Yes, though it might be GPT-5 UI.

Actually 5. The gemini result is pretty correct. And for that test, IMO only gemini properly preserved the original aesthetic. All others don't have the dark/scary mood.

Not always! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydactyl_cat