Disclosure: Lumina’s Krea 3 launch post was sponsored, and Krea provided early access. The examples in this article come from that access.
Krea has opened the Krea 3 beta, an image-editing model built around quick revisions and more control over what changes. The company says it can complete native 2K edits in under eight seconds, with bounding boxes for local changes and support for successive edits. 1
Our first impression was simple: it felt very quick and worked well across different styles. We have not run a controlled timing comparison against competing models. 3
What the examples show
The seascape above is a useful place to start. The mountain, shoreline and breaking wave remain recognisable in both outputs, while the palette and surface treatment change substantially. The pixel-art version shifts towards bright orange and deep blue; the woodblock treatment uses flatter colours and patterned lines.
The house example asks for a larger transformation: turning a drawing into a photorealistic image. Krea keeps the broad composition while adding material textures, vegetation and afternoon light. The roof shapes and porch remain easy to recognise.
The portrait card shows the same approach with people: a shared pose and arrangement carried into two different materials. The raised arms remain in place, while the faces, hair and clothes take on the texture of clay or cut paper. 4
Controls, pricing and access
Krea’s product page describes regional editing, colour matching from hex codes and combining up to eight reference images. Bounding-box control is particularly useful in principle: it lets a user specify where an edit belongs instead of relying entirely on a written description. 2
The page currently lists $0.06 per image, against $0.135 for Nano Banana Pro. That is about 44% of the comparison price. We are using those published figures here rather than the quarter-cost comparison in our launch post. Krea’s four-times-faster and comparable-quality claims have not been independently verified by Lumina.
There is also a caveat beneath Krea’s side-by-side speed demonstration: it uses pre-generated outputs and an illustrative eight-second playback time for Krea 3. It should not be read as a live benchmark.
The beta is available on Krea. The company says the final release will follow next week with more benchmarks. 5
Sources & references
- Krea: beta launch announcement ↗
15 October 2026. Native 2K editing, speed and quality claims, and bounding-box controls.
- Krea 3: product details and pricing ↗
Checked on 15 October 2026. The page lists $0.06 per image and $0.135 for Nano Banana Pro; its comparison playback is illustrative.
- Lumina: sponsored launch post ↗
Paid partnership and early-access impressions. The launch post’s quarter-cost comparison is not used as the current price in this article.
- Lumina: early-access examples ↗
Selected original example cards from Lumina’s early access.
- Krea: final release planned for next week ↗
Krea says more benchmarks will accompany the final release; LoRAs and style references are available to experiment with through early access.
