Is Google’s new AI image-editing tool an Adobe-killer? We tried it to find out.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the potential of generative AI to disrupt established software businesses and related jobs.

A new Google AI image-editing tool offers another good example of this threat. It offers many of the capabilities of Adobe software, and yet the Google version is either free or cheaper and baked into a broader AI service that offers a lot more features.

So, is Google’s new AI photo editing tool any good?

My colleague Hugh Langley tested an early version of this Google image model, called Nano Banana. He found it to be generally better than rival tools. It’s not perfect — it sometimes struggled to replicate faces when combining two different photos — but he said it’s especially strong at making small tweaks to existing pictures.

In the example below, Hugh asked it to add glasses to a photo of himself and change the color of his T-shirt to red. While several other AI tools got the glasses and the color correct, Google’s was the only one to retain the stripe pattern on the T-shirt. It was also one of the sharper results.

When this full photo-editing AI tool came out on Tuesday as part of Google Gemini, Hugh and I had more fun.

We shared simple photos of each other with Gemini and asked for “a picture of both of us riding on a banana boat.” To keep the banana theme going.

For Hugh, it came up with this image, which has a strange guy on a jet ski behind us. Is that our personal security guard?

I took that image and asked Gemini to remove the guy on the jet ski, while keeping everything else the same. It did that in a few seconds.

The picture got a little pixelated, likely because I emailed it back and forth a couple of times. So I started again with the original photos of Hugh and I, and sent in the same request to Gemini. It created this in a few seconds:

This was fast, free, and really easy to use. The results were impressive, but not perfect. Gemini gave me US-style bright white teeth. Doesn’t it know I grew up in the UK??

“At least it looks a bit like you! Mine definitely does not look like me,” Hugh told me.

Gemini made Hugh thinner. As a new father with little time to exercise, he’s not complaining.

“That’s me once I’ve lost the dad weight,” Hugh wrote.

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