GPT-Image 2s Image to Image is... not good

Image 1 Prompt With reference Character (Image 2), Image 3 without reference character and the exact same prompt. So while standalone generations seem great, image to image generations seem to just overlay over the reference image, letting said image shimmer through (as clearly visible in Image 1). This is not exclusive to painterly, fantasy or artsy styles but as dominant in photo realistic images (I first thought it was an overkill countermeasure against deep fakes). Pretty disappointing to me, since the model is great with character consistency.