Converting Black and White Photos to Color with GPT Image 2.5

[Anand S]

Nano Banana (gemini-2.5-flash-image) did a pretty good job converting my parents' wedding photos to color.

I checked how well GPT Image 2.5 would do. The older GPT Image 2 model messed up the faces.

The short answer is: better than Gemini 2.5 Flash!

Here's the original and the GPT Image 2.5 colorized version, created with the prompt: "Convert this image to color."

The reason I picked this "benchmark" is because:

1. This is a real need for me.
2. This is a LLM failure: GPT Image 2 doesn't retain faces as well as Gemini 2.5 Flash does.
3. It's a benchmark I can evaluate really well. I mean, I know my parents' faces well enough to spot really subtle differences.

So, from that perspective, a few things GPT Image 2.5 managed to capture well was:

1. The slightly lost expression my mother has when she day-dreamed. This isn't obvious from the photo, but is a look I know well.
   BUT: She's smiling a bit more than she actually was.
2. The stern, straight look my father has.
   BUT: He has a slight smile on his face (I don't think he ever smiled in any wedding photo) with eyes slightly upwards.
3. My grandfather's downturned mounth - rather than a frown.
   BUT: It added what looks like a very mild moustache.

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I think there's a bias towards smiling faces. When I edited it further with this prompt:

Make it look like a modern digital camera was transported back in time to take exactly the same photo.
That is, same people, exactly the same faces, same clothes, etc. but much better photo quality.

... I got this image:

Both my parents, at least one cousin, and one uncle, are smiling slightly more than in the original.

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The reason this works is that I can quickly spot subtle difference in faces of family members. It's like "Oh, yeah, that's them." vs "Oh, that's not quite them."

This is the perfect kind of benchmark - something I can instantly evaluate, even as models grow far more capable.