Anyone who has asked an AI tool to fix one object in a picture knows what usually happens next: the object changes, and so does everything around it. Faces drift, textures soften, a background that was fine is quietly redrawn. Krea, the creative-tools company, is selling Krea 3 on the opposite promise. Its product page says the image editing model “changes only what you ask.”
If that holds up, it matters more than any speed figure. A designer retouching a product shot, or an agency changing one colour across a campaign, cannot ship an image where the untouched parts have shifted. The workflow Krea describes is built around that: draw a box, say what changes, and the model redraws inside it. Name a hex colour and it matches the product and nothing else. Feed it up to eight reference images, pointed at by number, and it combines them in one picture. Output is 2K natively (2736 by 1536 pixels).
The numbers come from Krea’s own landing page, which has no byline and no date, and names no outside evaluator. The headline figures are under 8 seconds per edit at about $0.06. In a side-by-side on the page, Nano Banana Pro takes about 26.8 seconds at about $0.135, and GPT Image 2.5 about 39.9 seconds at about $0.21. Those prices are described as approximate list prices for 2K edits, excluding promotions.
Read the fine print under that comparison, because Krea printed it itself. The outputs are “pre-generated outputs, not a live benchmark.” Krea 3’s 8 seconds is an “illustrative playback time,” not a measurement. The rivals’ times are medians from a 12-image batch, including time spent waiting in a queue, so the clocks are not measuring the same thing. And Krea labels the GPT Image 2.5 price “a draft estimate pending validation,” which means part of the cheaper-than-the-rest framing rests on a number the company has not confirmed.
The page also makes two separate speed claims, and they should not be merged. The hero says Krea 3 is 4x faster than Nano Banana Pro. A different banner says “10x Faster, 3x Cheaper” against GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro. The table on the same page gives roughly 3.4x against Nano Banana Pro and roughly 5x against GPT Image 2.5, using Krea’s own figures, and GPT Image 2 (without the .5) does not appear in it at all.
The precision test is thinner still. Krea asked each model to “change only her coat to cobalt blue” and scored the share of pixels outside the edit area that stayed unchanged. That is a sensible measure. It was run once per model, with Krea 3 in its Precise mode, and a single run shows what can happen, not how often it does. The page does not say whether the rivals were given an equivalent setting.
None of this makes the product weak. Cheap, fast, local edits are exactly what production teams want, and the model is already offered through fal, Baseten, Together AI, ComfyUI and others, with plugins listed for Photoshop, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Blender. The page also carries FAQ headings on whether the prices are temporary or subsidised and whether the model can be self-hosted. The answers did not appear in the text available for this story, so neither question can be settled here.
Both are worth settling before anything is built on it. A price that holds only through a launch promotion is a different decision from one that holds at volume, and a precision claim is only worth trusting once it has been run on your own images, not Krea’s coat.
Based on Krea’s Krea 3 product page (krea.ai/krea-3), undated, accessed 16 October 2026
