Google's Gemini is receiving a significant upgrade to its image editing capabilities, driven by the power of the Gemini 2.5 Flash Image large language model. This update focuses on enhancing creative control and output quality, making it a strong contender in the AI image editing landscape. The improved features revolve around character consistency, image fusion, and a deeper understanding of sketches and user instructions.

One of the standout improvements is Gemini's ability to maintain character consistency across multiple images and edits. This addresses a common challenge in AI image generation where character features can drift between prompts, leading to inconsistent results. With this update, users can ensure that faces, hairstyles, and outfits remain consistent, even when transforming or repositioning characters. This is particularly useful for storytelling, branding, and creating catalogs where a consistent visual identity is crucial. To achieve the best results, users should repeat defining traits in their prompts and use iterative prompts to build changes step by step.

Gemini 2.5 Flash Image also excels at multi-image fusion, allowing users to blend multiple images into a single, realistic composition. This feature enables users to combine objects, restyle environments, and merge photos seamlessly. For example, you could combine a photo of yourself with a picture of your pet to create a unique portrait. Google AI Studio offers a template app where users can drag products into a new scene to quickly create photorealistic fused images.

The new model's "native world knowledge" allows it to understand hand-drawn diagrams and follow complex editing instructions. This means Gemini can interpret sketches and use them as a basis for generating or editing images. This capability opens up new possibilities for educational applications, where the AI can assist with understanding and visualizing concepts.

Furthermore, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image supports precise local edits with natural language prompts. Users can make targeted transformations such as blurring backgrounds, removing objects, altering poses, or colorizing photos simply by describing the desired change. This conversational editing capability makes it easier to refine images without needing complex software.

Google has partnered with OpenRouter.ai and fal.ai to expand the model's reach to a wider audience of developers. To promote responsible AI development, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image incorporates SynthID, Google DeepMind's invisible watermarking tool, to identify AI-generated or edited images.

While Gemini 2.5 Flash Image offers significant improvements, there are still some limitations to keep in mind. The model's stylization can sometimes be inconsistent, and it may occasionally misspell words or struggle with complex typography. Character consistency is generally reliable but may not always be perfect. The model may also have difficulty maintaining specific aspect ratios. Google is actively working to address these limitations and further improve the model's performance.

Gemini's updated image editor is available in the Gemini app, Google AI Studio, and Vertex AI. It is priced at $0.039 per image. By providing enhanced creative control, improved character consistency, and a deeper understanding of user intentions, Google is positioning Gemini as a powerful tool for both casual users and professional creators.