how to work on face quality?

[grumpyp]

check:

[osachub]

Absolutely. After 0.9.X, all faces develop a very sticky, unnatural look, and it also makes younger people appear older—showing many different types of wrinkles.

[grumpyp]

how to solve?

[wiltodelta]

Good catch, and you are right that the sticky, aged look comes from the regeneration pass, not the watermark removal.

The fix is to upgrade to v0.11.4. You reported v0.11.2 over in #36, and on that version the default regeneration strength for Gemini images was higher than it needed to be, which over-regenerated faces and let the polish pile grain on top, exactly the sticky, slightly older look you are describing. In v0.11.3 I retuned the default down to the level that still removes the watermark but stops touching faces more than necessary. I reran your kind of image across versions to confirm:

Left to right: original, v0.9.0, v0.11.2 (what you are on), v0.11.4. At the v0.11.4 default the faces land measurably closer to the original on every face, while v0.11.2 drifts them and adds grain on top.

One more thing: I deliberately do not ship a face-restore step. Every restorer I tested (GFPGAN, CodeFormer, InstantID, PhotoMaker) made faces look more AI-generated, not less, which is why they were removed in v0.9.0.

And if you only need the visible mark and the metadata gone, you can skip the regeneration entirely: remove-ai-watermarks visible <img> or metadata <img> --remove leave faces pixel-exact.