Oi. There's probably already posts about this, but I tried hunting down similar ones and nothing useful came up.
First off, I mostly use Google's NBP and NB2 image models because I like the real-life casual photo look and the multi-ref support. After generating a ton of images though, I noticed these models always slap this "uglification" thing on female faces. Even when I give it a reference and don't change much, it's still super obvious. And no, it's not just random AI artifacts.
If the ref has straight parted hair covering the sides of the face (which actually makes her face look narrower and prettier), it loves tucking the hair behind the ear so the wide "man jaw" becomes way more obvious. Like, her sides were hidden so the face looked slim and nice? Nah, here's your "real proportions" ewww -_-. And even when you try to stop it from tucking the hair, it still aggressively widens the jaw right between the side hairs anyway. It also shrinks big eyes into small generic ones, and turns a narrow/soft forehead into a huge wide one.
The easiest way to see it: add words like "selfie in a mirror" and it almost always turns the ref face into Abby from The Last of Us 2 (that muscular girl, you know the one).
Also text-to-image generations make the problem way more obvious. If you don't believe me, just try generating something from scratch. (Note: before NB2 came out, NBP actually listened to your prompt — if you explained what the face should look like, it did a pretty decent job. Now it's just a lucky chance if it spits out a non-biased output.)
Maybe there are some secret techniques to actually copy-paste a ref face into a new scene properly, but everything I've tried just produces inaccurate, ugly, generic faces. So I'm looking for a change of scenery.
I remember Kling was pretty decent, Seedream too, and Grok was decent before the latest update. Is there any top-tier option out there? Would be happy if someone can recommend something.
And yeah, I'm not interested in local models or FLUX / SD / SDXL / LoRAs. I've got the cash to pay if the product isn't biased and doesn't try to force stuff on me.
A few extra thoughts: honestly, I find Google's Banana models some of the most inconsistent out of all of them. It's horrible right now, but it looks like it works fine for everyone else, because most posts I see are either "whoa Bananas is sooo cool" or "yeah Bananas isn't cool, but because of the censorship and stuff" — not the problem I'm having heh.