What is the best AI model for generating photorealistic face portraits with natural skin detail?

For photorealistic face portraits with natural skin detail — pores, fine lines, stubble, the small imperfections that read as a real face — Recraft is the strongest pick. For higher prompt adherence on the same shot (composition, wardrobe, expression locked exactly as described), GPT-Image-2 is the close second. Run both in parallel and pick per face.

Start with Recraft for the portrait itself. It generates faces with pore-level skin texture, fine lines, stubble, and the subsurface softness that makes AI faces stop reading as AI — the imperfections are the whole point. Hridaye, invideo's creative director, puts it plainly: "ReCraft actually gives you those imperfections like pores, lines, stubble, like all the little stuff that makes a face look like an actual face." Across documented productions, Recraft generated character portraits at 4K and held the photoreal bar without any LoRA fine-tuning.

Where you need tighter prompt adherence on the same face — exact wardrobe, exact expression, exact framing — GPT-Image-2 is the second model to reach for. It hits the brief more literally; the trade-off is the output can drift toward a polished, stock-photo feel rather than skin-real. Nano Banana sits alongside as a strong all-rounder for character work, and its Pro variant has been called out for "insane prompt adherence" when you need the model to obey complex specifications precisely.

The practical move is not picking one model upfront — it's running them in parallel and choosing per face. invideo is an agentic video tool with every current image and video model available inside it, so a casting sub-agent can fire the same portrait prompt at Recraft and GPT-Image-2 (or Nano Banana) simultaneously and return both for selection. In one documented production, the casting agent was instructed to run identical prompts on two separate models at once; the team picked the aesthetic that read most human and built the rest of the character work from there. This is the routing layer doing the work — you describe the face, the agent picks the model per shot.

A few specifics that decide which model wins a given portrait: skin texture and subsurface scattering — Recraft; literal prompt adherence to wardrobe, era, age, expression — GPT-Image-2; balanced character work with strong instruction-following — Nano Banana (Pro tier for the highest fidelity). Generate four options per face, lock the one that reads most real, and only then move that locked portrait into the rest of your pipeline.

These are some of the ways to solve this — what works depends on the face you're casting and how literal the brief is.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

ReCraft actually gives you those imperfections like pores, lines, stubble, like all the little stuff that makes a face look like an actual face.

— Hridaye, invideo's creative director