Hacker News Reader

Comment by gs17 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me that the models often have their "quirks". GPT has the orange tint, but it also is much worse at being consistent with details. Gemini has a problem where it often returns the image unchanged or almost unchanged, to the point where I gave up on using it for editing anything. Not sure if Seedream has a similar defining "feature".

They noted the Gemini issue too:

> Especially with photos of people, Gemini seems to refuse to apply any edits at all

View on HN

Nano Banana in general cannot do style transfer effectively unless the source image/subject is a similar style as the target style, which is an interesting and unexpected model quirk. Even the documentation examples unintentionally demonstrates this.

Seedream will always alter the global color balance with edits.

Something like a style transfer works better in Whisk. Still quirky and hit and miss.

I've definitely noticed Gemini's tendency to return the image basically unchanged, but not noticed it being worse or better for images of people. When I tested by having it change aspects of a photo of me, I found it was far more likely to cooperate when I'd specify, for instance, "change the hair from long to short" rather than "Make the hair short" (the latter routinely failed completely).

It also helped to specify which other parts should not be changed, otherwise it was rather unpredictable about whether it would randomly change other aspects.

Not only does it return the image unchanged, but if you are using the Gemini interface, it confidently tells you it made the changes.

Check out Mask Banana - you might have better luck with using masks to get image models to pay attention to what you want edited.

I have had that problem with nano banana but when it works I find it so much better than the others for editing an image. Since it’s free I usually try it first, and I would say approximately 10% of the time find myself having to use something else.

I’m editing mostly pics of food and beverages though, it wouldn’t surprise me if it is situationally better or worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com