Disclosure: I’m building Pixolm. This is a small reference-editing example made in it. The person is fictional and AI-generated.
Image order: original brown hair, copper, ash blonde, cherry red.
Each edit attached only the original portrait. None used the previous color result. Settings: Nano Banana 2.1, 1:1, 1K, Standard, one output per request, no mask. The downloaded originals are 1024 × 1024 PNGs.
What I noticed:
- Copper gives a clear warm shift while keeping light and dark strands, but some lower waves get redrawn.
- Ash blonde comes out as muted gray-beige with darker roots, rather than uniform platinum.
- Cherry red is red-violet in the highlights and much darker in the shadows. Some flyaways change as well.
Here are the exact edit prompts:
Copper
Use the attached portrait as the single reference. Change only the scalp hair from chestnut brown to a natural medium copper color with restrained orange-red warmth. Keep the same shoulder length, center part, loose waves, hairline and visible strand structure as closely as possible. Preserve the face, expression, eye color, eyebrows, skin tone and texture, ivory shirt, warm-gray background, camera viewpoint, framing and direction of the soft neutral daylight. Do not tint the face, eyebrows, shirt or background. Keep believable darker roots and lighter strands where the existing light falls; do not flatten the hair into one solid color. One photorealistic square portrait, no makeup changes, no added accessories, no words or logos.
Ash blonde
Use the attached original chestnut-brown portrait as the single reference. Change only the scalp hair to a cool ash-blonde color: light beige-blonde lengths with a restrained gray undertone and believable slightly darker roots. Keep the same shoulder length, center part, loose waves, hairline and visible strand structure as closely as possible. Preserve the face, expression, eye color, eyebrows, skin tone and texture, ivory shirt, warm-gray background, camera viewpoint, framing and direction of the soft neutral daylight. Do not tint or brighten the face, eyebrows, shirt or background. Keep shadows and individual highlights rather than flattening the hair into one solid color. One photorealistic square portrait, no makeup changes, no added accessories, no words or logos.
Cherry red
Use the attached original chestnut-brown portrait as the single reference. Change only the scalp hair to a deep cherry-red burgundy color, with rich red-violet lengths and believable slightly darker roots. Keep the same shoulder length, center part, loose waves, hairline and visible strand structure as closely as possible. Preserve the face, expression, eye color, eyebrows, skin tone and texture, ivory shirt, warm-gray background, camera viewpoint, framing and direction of the soft neutral daylight. Do not tint the face, eyebrows, shirt or background. Keep individual highlights and shadows instead of a flat solid fill. One photorealistic square portrait, no makeup changes, no added accessories, no words or logos.
For a repeatable comparison, keep the original reference, change the color instruction, and compare at the same scale. I check the part, hairline, hair ends, eyebrows, face and any color spill onto the shirt or background.
This is one fictional subject and one result per color, without an identity score or a success-rate claim. It is a photo-editing preview, not a prediction of a real dye result. No extra correction attempts were run for these images.
