Tested & ranked
5 prompts · 10 models · three verdicts · Last updated Oct 5, 2026
Faces and people: skin, hands, expressions, lighting and believable likeness.
Short answer
The best AI image model for portraits & people (tested Oct 5, 2026) is Nano Banana Pro, scoring 4.4/5 across 5 prompts at $0.150 per image. Krea 2 Turbo is the best value: 4.0/5 for $0.0080 per image. It is also the fastest, with a median 3.0 s from request to finished image. We sent the same prompts with the same settings to all 10 models.
Last tested
| # | Model | Editor | AI judge | Community | $/image | Time to image |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nano Banana ProGoogle | pending | 4.4 | soon | $0.150 | 23.4 s |
| 2 | Grok Imagine 2.0xAI | pending | 4.2 | soon | $0.060 | 66.2 s |
| 3 | Ideogram V4.5Ideogram | pending | 4.2 | soon | $0.060 | 9.1 s |
| 4 | Seedream 5.0 ProByteDance | pending | 4.2 | soon | $0.101 | 40.5 s |
| 5 | GPT Image 2OpenAI | pending | 4.2 | soon | $0.171 | 101.1 s |
| 6 | Qwen Image 3Alibaba | pending | 4.0 | soon | $0.040 | 17.0 s |
| 7 | Krea 2 TurboKrea | pending | 4.0 | soon | $0.0080 | 3.0 s1.0 s generating |
| 8 | Recraft V4.1Recraft | pending | 3.9 | soon | $0.035 | 12.6 s |
| 9 | FLUX.2 [pro]Black Forest Labs | pending | 3.8 | soon | $0.030 | 10.8 s |
| 10 | FLUX.2 [dev]Black Forest Labs | pending | 3.5 | soon | $0.012 | 8.3 s2.9 s generating |
Ranked by the editor score once every model is editor-scored, otherwise by the AI judge. How we test
Each dot is a model: higher is better, further left is cheaper.
| Model | Score | Price per image |
|---|---|---|
| Nano Banana Pro | 4.42 | $0.15 |
| Grok Imagine 2.0 | 4.17 | $0.06 |
| Ideogram V4.5 | 4.17 | $0.06 |
| Seedream 5.0 Pro | 4.17 | $0.1 |
| GPT Image 2 | 4.17 | $0.17 |
| Qwen Image 3 | 4.03 | $0.04 |
| Krea 2 Turbo | 4.02 | $0.008 |
| Recraft V4.1 | 3.87 | $0.04 |
| FLUX.2 [pro] | 3.82 | $0.03 |
| FLUX.2 [dev] | 3.47 | $0.01 |
Median wait per image, including queue time: higher is better, further left is faster.
| Model | Score | Time to image |
|---|---|---|
| Nano Banana Pro | 4.42 | 23 s |
| Grok Imagine 2.0 | 4.17 | 66 s |
| Ideogram V4.5 | 4.17 | 9.1 s |
| Seedream 5.0 Pro | 4.17 | 40 s |
| GPT Image 2 | 4.17 | 101 s |
| Qwen Image 3 | 4.03 | 17 s |
| Krea 2 Turbo | 4.02 | 3 s |
| Recraft V4.1 | 3.87 | 13 s |
| FLUX.2 [pro] | 3.82 | 11 s |
| FLUX.2 [dev] | 3.47 | 8.3 s |
Every model gets the same prompt. Open one to compare all results side by side.
Professional corporate headshot of a man in his forties with short salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a navy suit and a white shirt, with a slight smile, against a neutral mid-gray seamless backdrop. Soft key light from the left with a gentle fill, sharp focus on the eyes, shallow depth of field.
![FLUX.2 [pro]: Corporate headshot on gray](https://img.promptlineup.com/image/portrait-corporate-headshot--flux-2-pro--s1-512.webp)
Candid photo of four friends of different ethnicities laughing together at a picnic table in a park at golden hour, one of them raising a glass of lemonade. Natural expressions, warm backlight, 35mm lens look.
Friendly portrait of a female nurse in teal scrubs standing in a bright hospital corridor with her arms crossed and a stethoscope around her neck. Her name badge clearly reads "MARIA LOPEZ, RN".
Close-up documentary photo of an elderly woman's wrinkled hands shaping wet clay on a spinning pottery wheel, with clay slip on her fingers. Warm window light; her smiling face is softly out of focus in the background.
Fine-art portrait of a young man with curly dark hair and a short beard, wearing a textured wool sweater. Rembrandt lighting with a small triangle of light on the shadow-side cheek, a black background, moody low-key photographic look.
Nano Banana Pro by Google scored highest in our tests: 4.4/5 across 5 prompts, at $0.150 per image.
Krea 2 Turbo costs $0.0080 per image on average and scored 4.0/5.
Krea 2 Turbo: 4.0/5 for $0.0080 per image, the highest score per dollar among the 10 models we tested.
Krea 2 Turbo, with a median 3.0 s from sending the request to receiving the finished image, queue time included.
Every model received the same 5 prompts with the same aspect ratio and default settings through the fal.ai API. Each image is scored from 1 to 5 on prompt adherence, aesthetics, text accuracy and artifacts by an AI judge and, once reviewed, by a human editor.