14 ms·
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for nuanced AI image generation
- doctorpangloss 1y agolots of words okay, look at imagen 4 ultra: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%5B%221VEyrDfahuQWc-RlVlX-UQWTUznMnngW5%22%5D,%22action%22:%22open%22,%22userId%22:%22113976388047503014674%22,%22resourceKeys%22:%7B%7D%7D&usp=sharing https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%... In this link, Imagen is instructed to render the verbatim prompt “the result of 4+5”, which shows that text, and not instructed, which renders “4+5=9” Is Imagen thinking? Let's compare to gemini 2.5 flash image (nano banana): look carefully at the system prompt here: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%5B%221ovRe9nanKGnha9iw7jH_w0ydK9d41HXU%22%5D,%22action%22:%22open%22,%22userId%22:%22113976388047503014674%22,%22resourceKeys%22:%7B%7D%7D&usp=sharing https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%... Gemini is instructed to reply in images first, and if it thinks, to think using the image thinking tags. It cannot seemingly be prompted to show verbatim the result 4+5 without showing the answer 4+5=9. Of course it can show whatever exact text that you want, the question is, does it prompt rewrite (no) or do something else (yes)? compare to ideogram, with prompt rewriting: https://ideogram.ai/g/GRuZRTY7TmilGUHnks-Mjg/0 https://ideogram.ai/g/GRuZRTY7TmilGUHnks-Mjg/0 without prompt rewriting: https://ideogram.ai/g/yKV3EwULRKOu6LDCsSvZUg/2 https://ideogram.ai/g/yKV3EwULRKOu6LDCsSvZUg/2 We can do the same exercises with Flux Kontext for editing versus Flash-2.5, if you think that editing is somehow unique in this regard. Is prompt rewriting "thinking"? My point is, this article can't answer that question without dElViNg into the nuances of what multi-modal models really are.
- gryfft 1y agoCan you provide screenshots or links that don't require login
- PunchTornado 1y agosorry, but I don't understand you post. those links don't work.
- dostick 1y agoUse Google AI Studio to submit requests, and to remove watermark, open browser development tools and right click on request to “watermark_4” image and select to block it. And from next generation there will be no watermark!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- billynomates 1y agoThat sounds dangerous honestly. Watermarks should be mandatory for AI generated images.
- dymk 1y agoHow would you enforce that when it’s actually important? Any “bad actor” could just open photoshop and remove it. Or run a delobotimized model which doesn’t watermark.
- dieortin 1y agoThis only applies to the visible watermark on the corner, which you could crop anyways. If I’m not mistaken, all images generated by Google models have an invisible watermark: https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/ https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
- dreis_sw 1y agoSo the watermark is being added to the image on the client-side? That's pretty bad
- wormpilled 1y agoCan't believe that worked, thanks!
- squigz 1y agoI'm getting annoyed by using "prompt engineered" as a verb. Does this mean I'm finally old and bitter? (Do we say we software engineered something?)
- officeplant 1y agoNot really since "prompt engineering" can be tossed in the same pile as "vibe coding." Just people coping with not developing the actual skills to produce the desired products.
- bongodongobob 1y agoCouldn't care less. I don't need to know how to do literally everything. AI fills in my gaps and I'm a ton more productive.
- squigz 1y agoI wouldn't bother trying to convince people who are upset that others have figured out a way to use LLMs. It's not logical.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoTry getting a small model to do what you want quickly with high accuracy, high quality, etc, and using few tokens per request. You'll find out that prompt engineering is real and matters.
- vpShane 1y agoYou're definitely old and bitter, welcome to it. You CREATED something, and I like to think that creating things that I love and enjoy and that others can love and enjoy makes creating things worth it.
- squigz 1y agoDon't get me wrong, I have nothing against using AI as an expression of creativity :)
- miladyincontrol 1y agoTheres lots these models can do but I despise when people suggest they can do edits with "with only the necessary aspects changed". No, that simply is not true. If you actually compare the before and after you can see it still regenerates all the details on the "unchanged" aspects. Texture, lighting, sharpness, even scale its all different even if varyingly similar to the original. Sure they're cute for casual edits but it really pains me people suggesting these things are suitable replacements for actual photo editing. Especially when it comes to people, or details outside their training data theres a lot of nuance that can be lost as it regenerates them no matter how you prompt things. Even if you
- StevenWaterman 1y agoThat is true for gpt-image-1 but not nano-banana. They can do masked image changes
- minimaxir 1y agoNano Banana is different and much better at edits without changing texture/lighting/sharpness/color balance, and I am someone that is extremely picky about it. That's why I add the note that Gemini 2.5 Flash is aware of segmentation masks, and that's my hunch why that's the case.
- BoredPositron 1y agoNano banana has a really low spatial scaling and doesn't affect details like other models.
- miohtama 1y agoCould you just mask out the area you wish to change in more advanced tools, or is there something in the model itself which would prevent this?
- lunarboy 1y agoThat's probably where things are headed and there are already products trying this (even photoshop already). Just like how code gen AI tools don't replace the entire file on every prompt iteration.
- mkagenius 1y ago> Nano Banana is still bad at rendering text perfectly/without typos as most image generation models. I figured that if you write the text in Google docs and share the screenshot with banana it will not make any spelling mistake. So, use something like "can you write my name on this Wimbledon trophy, both images are attached. Use them" will work.
- minimaxir 1y agoGoogle's example documentation for Nano Banana does demo that pipeline: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation#python_12 https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation#pytho... That's on my list of blog-post-worthy things to test, namely text rendering to image in Python directly and passing both input images to the model for compositing.
- mkagenius 1y agoYeah, close. But it is still generating it with a prompt > Logo: "A simple, modern logo with the letters 'G' and 'A' in a white circle. My idea was do to it manually so that there is no probabilities involved. Though your idea of using python is same.
- ml-anon 1y ago"prompt engineered"...i.e. by typing in what you want to see.
- harpiaharpyja 1y agoNot all models can actually do that if your prompt is particular
- pksebben 1y agoMost designers can't, either. Defining a spec is a skill. It's actually fairly difficult to put to words any specific enough vision such that it becomes understandable outside of your own head. This goes for pretty much anything, too.
- Razengan 1y agoYep, knowing how and what to ask is a skill. For anything, even back in the "classical" search days.
- pksebben 1y agoat least then, we had hard overrides that were actually hard. "This got searched verbatim, every time" W*ldcards were handy and so on... Now, you get a 'system prompt' which is a vague promise that no really this bit of text is special you can totally trust us (which inevitably dies, crushed under the weight of an extended context window). Unfortunately(?), I think this bug/feature has gotta be there. It's the price for the enormous flexibility. Frankly, I'd not be mad if we had less control - my guess is that in not too many years we're going to look back on RLHF and grimace at our draconian methods. Yeah, if you're only trying to build a "get the thing I intend done" machine I guess it's useful, but I think the real power in these models is in their propensity to expose you to new ideas and provide a tireless foil for all the half-baked concepts that would otherwise not get room to grow.
- andai 1y agohttps://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-a...
- pfortuny 1y agoWell, I just asked it for a 13-sided irregular polygon (is it that hard?)… https://imgur.com/a/llN7V0W https://imgur.com/a/llN7V0W
- BoredPositron 1y agoThe kicker for nano banana is not prompt adherence which is a really nice to have but the fact that it's either working on pixel space or with a really low spatial scaling. It's the only model that doesn't kill your details because of vae encode/decode.
- sebzim4500 1y agoIt's really cool how good of a job it did rendering a page given its HTML code. I was not expecting it to do nearly as well.
- kridsdale1 1y agoSame. This must have training from sites that show html next to screenshots of the pages.
- leviathant 1y agoI was kind of surprised by this line: >Nano Banana is terrible at style transfer even with prompt engineering shenanigans My context: I'm kind of fixated on visualizing my neighborhood as it would have appeared in the 18th century. I've been doing it in Sketchup, and then in Twinmotion, but neither of those produce "photorealistic" images... Twinmotion can get pretty close with a lot of work, but that's easier with modern architecture than it is with the more hand-made, brick-by-brick structures I'm modeling out. As different AI image generators have emerged, I've tried them all in an effort to add the proverbial rough edges to snapshots of the models I've created, and it was not until Nano Banana that I ever saw anything even remotely workable. Nano Banana manages to maintain the geometry of the scene, while applying new styles to it. Sometimes I do this with my Twinmotion renders, but what's really been cool to see is how well it takes a drawing, or engraving, or watercolor - and with as simple a prompt as "make this into a photo" it generates phenomenal results. Similarly to the Paladin/Starbucks/Pirate example in the link though, I find that sometimes I need to misdirect a little bit, because if I'm peppering the prompt with details about the 18th century, I sometimes get a painterly image back. Instead, I'll tell it I want it to look like a photograph of a well preserved historic neighborhood, or a scene from a period film set in the 18th century. As fantastic as the results can be, I'm not abandoning my manual modeling of these buildings and scenes. However, Nano Banana's interpretation of contemporary illustrations has helped me reshape how I think about some of the assumptions I made in my own models.
- echelon 1y agoYou can't take a highly artistic image and supply it as a style reference. Nano Banana can't generalize to anything not in its training.
- leviathant 1y agoFair enough! I suppose I've avoided that kind of "style transfer" for a variety of reasons, it hadn't even occurred to me that people were still interested in that. And I don't say that to open up debate on the topic, just explaining away my own ignorance/misinterpretation. Thanks
- simonw 1y agoI like the Python library that accompanies this: https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg I added a CLI to it (using Gemini CLI) and submitted a PR, you can run that like so: GEMINI_API_KEY="..." \ uv run --with https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/archive/d6b9d5bbefa1e2ffc3b09086bc0a3ad70ca4ef22.zip \ python -m gemimg "a racoon holding a hand written sign that says I love trash" Result in this comment: https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/pull/7#issuecomment-3529300447 https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/pull/7#issuecomment-3529...
- echelon 1y agoThe author went to great lengths about open source early on. I wonder if they'll cover the QwenEdit ecosystem. I'm exceptionally excited about Chinese editing models. They're getting closer and closer to NanoBanana in terms of robustness, and they're open source. This means you can supply masks and kernels and do advanced image operations, integrate them into visual UIs, etc. You can even fine tune them and create LoRAs that will do the style transferring tasks that Nano Banana falls flat on. I don't like how closed the frontier US models are, and I hope the Chinese kick our asses. That said, I love how easy it'll be to distill Nano Banana into a new model. You can pluck training data right out of it: ((any image, any instruction) -> completion) tuples.
- minimaxir 1y agoI've been keeping an eye on Qwen-Edit/Wan 2.2 shenanigans and they are interesting: however actually running those types of models is too cumbersome and in the end unclear if it's actually worth it over the $0.04/image for Nano Banana.
- CamperBob2 1y agoI was skeptical about the notion of running similar models locally as well, but the person who did this (https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1osi1q0/wan_22_more_motion_more_emotion https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1osi1q0/wa... ) swears that they generated it locally, just letting a single 5090 crunch away for a week. If that's true, it seems worth getting past the 'cumbersome' aspects. This tech may not put Hollywood out of business, but it's clear that the process of filmmaking won't be recognizable in 10 years if amateurs can really do this in their basements today.
- peetle 1y agoIn my own experience, nano banana still has the tendency to: - make massive, seemingly random edits to images - adjust image scale - make very fine grained but pervasive detail changes obvious in an image diff For instance, I have found that nano-banana will sporadically add a (convincing) fireplace to a room or new garage behind a house. This happens even with explicit "ALL CAPS" instructions not to do so. This happens sporadically, even when the temperature is set to zero, and makes it impossible to build a reliable app. Has anyone had a better experience?
- andblac 1y agoThe "ALL CAPS" part of your comment got me thinking. I imagine most llms understand subtle meanings of upper case text use depending on context. But, as I understand it, ALL CAPS text will tokenize differently than lower case text. Is that right? In that case, won't the upper case be harder to understand and follow for most models since it's less common in datasets?
- minimaxir 1y agoThere's more than enough ALL CAPS text in the corpus of the entire internet, and enough semantic context associated with it for it to be intended to be in the imperative voice.
- miohtama 1y agoShouldn't all caps normalised to tokens like low caps? There are no separate tokens for all caps and low caps in Llama, or at least not in the past.
- minimaxir 1y agoLooking at the tokenizer for the older Llama 2 model, the tokenizer has capital letters in it: https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf
- symisc_devel 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ainiriand 1y agoThe blueberry and strawberry are not actually where they prompted.
- mFixman 1y agoThe author overlooked an interesting error in the second skull pancake image: the strawberry is on the right eye socket (to the left of the image), and the blackberry is on the left eye socket (to the right of the image)! This looks like it's caused by 99% of the relative directions in image descriptions describing them from the looker's point of view, and that 99% of the ones that aren't it they refer to a human and not to a skull-shaped pancake.
- martin-adams 1y agoI picked up on that also. I feel that a lot of humans would also get confused about whether you mean the eye on the left, or the subject's left eye.
- Closi 1y agoTo be honest this is the sort of thing Nano Bannana is weak at in my experience. It's absolutely amazing - but doesn't understand left/right/up/down/shrink this/move this/rotate this etc. See below to demonstrate this weakness with the same prompts as the article see the link below, which demonstrates that it is a model weakness and not just a language ambiguity: https://gemini.google.com/share/a024d11786fc https://gemini.google.com/share/a024d11786fc
- ffsm8 1y agoMmh, ime you need to discard the session/rewrite the failing prompt instead of continuing and correcting on failures. Once errors occur you've basically introduced a poison pill which will continuously make things to haywire. Spelling out what it did wrong is the most destructive thing you can do - at least in my experience
- astrange 1y agoAlmost no image/video models can do "upside-down" either.
- basch 1y agoto the point where you can say, raise the left arm and then raise the right arm and get the same image with the same arm raised.
- layer8 1y ago> It’s one of the best results I’ve seen for this particular test, and it’s one that doesn’t have obvious signs of “AI slop” aside from the ridiculous premise. It’s pretty good, but one conspicuous thing is that most of the blueberries are pointing upwards.
- satvikpendem 1y agoFor images of people generated from scratch, Nano Banana always adds a background blur, it can't seem to create more realistic or candid images such as those taken via a point and shoot or smartphone, has anyone solved this sort of issue? It seems to work alright if you give it an existing image to edit however. I saw some other threads online about it but I didn't see anyone come up with solutions.
- kridsdale1 1y agoMaybe try including “f/16” or “f/22” as those are likely to be in the training set for long depth of field photos.
- satvikpendem 1y agoI tried that but they don't seem to make much difference for whatever reason, you still can't get a crisp shot such as this [0] where the foreground and background details are all preserved (linked shot was taken with an iPhone which doesn't seem to do shallow depth of field unless you use their portrait mode). [0] https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w1600/2024/09/IMG_2486.jpg https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w1600/2024/09/IMG...
- astrange 1y agoThose are rarely in the captions for the image. They'd have to extract the EXIF for photos and include it in recaptioning. Which they should be doing, but I doubt they thought about it.
- efskap 1y agoPhoto sites like Flickr do extract EXIF data and show it next to the image, but who knows if the scraping picked them up. Looks like specific f-stops don't actually make a difference for stable diffusion at least: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1adgcf3/comparisons_of_various_photorealism_prompt/ https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1adgcf3/co...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jdc0589 1y agoI don't feel like I should search for "nano banana" on my work laptop
- insane_dreamer 1y agoI haven't paid much attention to image generation models (not my area of interest), but these examples are shockingly good.
- comex 1y agoI tried asking for a shot from a live-action remake of My Neighbor Totoro. This is a task I’ve been curious about for a while. Like Sonic, Totoro is the kind of stylized cartoon character that can’t be rendered photorealistically without a great deal of subjective interpretation, which (like in Sonic’s case) is famously easy to get wrong even for humans. Unlike Sonic, Totoro hasn’t had an actual live-action remake, so the model would have to come up with a design itself. I was wondering what it might produce – something good? something horrifying? Unfortunately, neither; it just produced a digital-art style image, despite being asked for a photorealistic one, and kept doing so even when I copied some of the keyword-stuffing from the post. At least it tried. I can’t test this with ChatGPT because it trips the copyright filter.
- roywiggins 1y agoAnother thing it can't do is remove reflections in windows, it's nearly a no-op.
- sejje 1y ago>> "The image style is definitely closer to Vanity Fair (the photographer is reflected in his breastplate!)" I didn't expect that. I would have definitely counted that as a "probably real" tally mark if grading an image.
- Genego 1y agoI have been generating a few dozen images per day for storyboarding purposes. The more I try to perfect it, the easier it becomes to control these outputs and even keep the entire visual story as well as their characters consistent over a few dozen different scenes; while even controlling the time of day throughout the story. I am currently working with 7 layers prompts to control for environment, camera, subject, composition, light, colors and overall quality (it might be overkill, but it’s also experimenting). I also created a small editing suite for myself where I can draw bounding boxes on images when they aren’t perfect, and have them fixed. Either just with a prompt or feeding them to Claude as image and then having it write the prompt to fix the issue for me (as a workflow on the api). It’s been quite a lot of fun to figure out what works. I am incredibly impressed by where this is all going. Once you do have good storyboards. You can easily do start-to-end GenAI video generation (hopping from scene to scene) and bring them to life and build your own small visual animated universes.
- taylorhughes 1y agoWe use nano banana extensively to build video storyboards, which we then turn into full motion video with a combination of img2vid models. It sounds like we're doing similar things, trying to keep images/characters/setting/style consistent across ~dozens of images (~minutes of video). You might like the product depending on what you're doing with the outputs! https://hypernatural.ai https://hypernatural.ai
- Genego 1y agoYes we are definitely doing the same! For now I’m just familiarizing myself in this space technically and conceptually. https://edwin.genego.io/blog https://edwin.genego.io/blog
- roywiggins 1y agoYour "Dracula" character is possibly the least vampiric Dracula I've ever seen tbh
- beckos 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BeetleB 1y agoNano Banana can be frustrating at times. Yesterday I tried to get it to do several edits to an image, and it would return back pretty much the same photo. Things like: Convert the people to clay figures similar to what one would see in a claymation. And it would think it did it, but I could not perceive any change. After several attempts, I added "Make the person 10 years younger". Suddenly it made a clay figure of the person.
- minimaxir 1y agoThe first request is a style transfer, which is why I included the Ghibli failure example.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoI really wish that real expert stuff, like how to do controlnet, use regional prompting, or most other advanced ComfyUI stuff got upvoted to the top instead.
- tomalbrc 1y agoCute. What’s the use case?
- qayxc 1y agoNSFW, mostly
- AuthError 1y agouse it for technical design doc, where i sketch out something on paper and ask nano banana to make flow chat, its incredibly good at this kind of editing (also if want to borrow image from someone and change some bridges usually its hard its embedded image, but nano banana solves that)
- 4b11b4 1y agoI found this well written. I read it start to finish. The author does a good job of taking you through their process
- smerrill25 1y agoCreated a tool you can try out!! sorry to self-plug but I launch on Product Hunt next week that lets you do this:) www.brandimagegen.com if you want a premium account to try out, you can find my email in my bio!!
- icemelt8 1y agohow did you do NSFW?
- vunderba 1y agoGood read minimaxir! From the article: > Nano Banana supports a context window of 32,768 tokens: orders of magnitude above T5’s 512 tokens and CLIP’s 77 tokens. In my pipeline for generating highly complicated images (particularly comics [1]), I take advantage of this by sticking a Mistral 7b LLM in-between that takes a given prompt as an input and creates 4 variations of it before sending them all out. > Surprisingly, Nano Banana is terrible at style transfer even with prompt engineering shenanigans, which is not the case with any other modern image editing model. This is true - though I find it works better by providing a minimum of two images. The first image is intended to be transformed, and the second image is used as "stylistic aesthetic reference". This doesn't always work since you're still bound by the original training data, but it is sometimes more effective than attempting to type out a long flavor text description of the style. [1] - https://mordenstar.com/portfolio/zeno-paradox https://mordenstar.com/portfolio/zeno-paradox
- junon 1y agoIt might also be an explicit guard against Studio Ghibli specifically after the "make me Ghibli" trend a while back, which upset Studio Ghibli (understandably so).
- minimaxir 1y agoIt happens with other styles. The demo documentation example which attempts to transfer an image into the very-public-domain Starry Night by Van Gogh doesn't do a true style transfer: https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1963429027382694264 https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1963429027382694264
- junon 1y agoAh interesting! Thanks for the clarification. Great article :)
- empressplay 1y agoThis article was a good read, but the writer doesn't seem to understand how model-based image generation actually works, using language that suggests the image is somehow progressively constructed the way a human would do it. Which is absurd. I've noticed a lot of this misinformation floating around lately, and I can't help but wonder if it's intentional?
- minimaxir 1y agoI'm not sure what you're implying is incorrect/misleading. As noted in the post, autoregressive models like Nano Banana and gpt-image-1 generate by token (and each generated token attends to all previous tokens, both text and image) which are then decoded, while diffusion models generate the entire image simultaneously, refined over n iteration steps.
- gtrealejandro 1y ago[flagged]
- junon 1y agoHow meta. This comment is clearly written by AI.
- achatham 1y agoMy personal project is illustrating arbitrary stories with consistent characters and settings. I've rewritten it at least 5 times, and Nano Banana has been a game-changer. My kids are willing to listen to much more sophisticated stories as long as it has pictures, so I've used it to illustrate text like Ender's Game. Unfortunately, it's getting harder to legally acquire books in a format you can feed to an LLM. I first extract all the entities from the text, generate characters from an art style, and then start stitching them together into individual illustrations. It works much better with NB than anything else I tried before.
- squigz 1y ago> so I've used it to illustrate text like Ender's Game That sounds interesting. Could you share?
- sigspec 1y agoregarding buzzword usage "YOU WILL BE PENALIZED FOR USING THEM" That is disconcerting.
- sixhobbits 1y agoIt's really nice to see long-form, obviously human-written blogs from people deep into the LLM space - maybe us writers will be around for a while still in spite of all the people saying we've been replaced.
- minimaxir 1y agoI've started increasing the number of jokes in my blog posts to make it sound more obviously human-written: to be honest I was expecting some "why is this so unserious" complaints.
- sixhobbits 1y agoCan't make everyone happy!
- baxtr 1y agoIn other words: you show your "personality". AI can't do that (yet?).
- debesyla 1y agoKinda like paper newspapers. In some ways it's "not optimal", but in many ways it's irreplaceable.
- Bromeo 1y agoThis works with the openrouter API as well, which skips having to make a google account etc. Here's a Claude-coded openrouter compatible adaptation which seems to work fine: https://github.com/RomeoV/gemimg https://github.com/RomeoV/gemimg A 1024x1024 image seems to cost about 3ct to generate.
- Psype 1y agoThat article says that most image generators had been over-shadowed by gpt. Yet when I ask some simple tasks to it, like doing a 16:9 picture sized image instead of a square one, it ends up doing a 16:9 on a white background that matches a square. When I ask it to make it with text, then on the second request to redo while changing just a certain visual element, it ends up breaking the previously asked text. It's getting more good at flattering people and telling them how clever and right they are than actually doing the task.
- Miraltar 1y agoIt doesn't say that gpt is better, just that it is more popular
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago> It's getting more good at flattering people and telling them how clever and right they are than actually doing the task. Not (knowingly) used an llm for a long time. Is the above true?
- jamesthurley 1y agoNope
- Psype 1y agoWhat's wrong then? It is definitely true from user experience.
- James_K 1y agoPerhaps I'm childish, but nano banana = tiny penis.
- kuu 1y agoIt was very interesting, I liked your style of explaining both at user level but also at more technical level. Very cool post, thanks for sharing!
- sd9 1y ago> Nano Banana supports a context window of 32,768 tokens: orders of magnitude above T5’s 512 tokens and CLIP’s 77 tokens. I had no idea that the context window was so large. I’d been instinctively keeping my prompts small because of experience with other models. I’m going to try much more detailed prompts now!
- skeptrune 1y agoI need to give this a shot for turning written stories into comics. Seems like the technology is finally there.
- d4rkp4ttern 1y agoPhoto-realism is great but the real step-jump in image-gen I’m looking for is the ability to draw high quality technical diagrams with a mix of text and images, so I can stop having LLMs generate crappy diagrams with mermaid, SVG, HTML/CSS, draw.io
- Twelveday 1y agoGreat post with some nice insights I could've used a few days ago! I was trying to create a simple "mascot logo" for my pet project. I first created an account on Kittl [0] and even paid for one month but it was quite cumbersome to generate images until I figured out I could just use the nano banana api myself. Took me 4 prompts to ai-slop a small python script I could run with uv that would generate me a specified amount of images with a given prompt (where I discovered some of the insight the author shows in their post). The resulting logo [1] was pretty much what I imagined. I manually added some text and played around with hue/saturation in Kittl (since I already paid for it :)) et voilà. Feeding back the logo to iterate over it worked pretty nicely and it even spit out an "abstract version" [2] of the logo for favicons and stuff without a lot of effort. All in all this took me 2 hours and around 2$ (excluding the 1 month Kittl subscription) and I would've never been able to draw something like that in Illustrator or similar. [0] https://www.kittl.com/ https://www.kittl.com/ [1] https://github.com/sidneywidmer/yass/blob/master/client/public/assets/logo.png https://github.com/sidneywidmer/yass/blob/master/client/publ... [2] https://github.com/sidneywidmer/yass/blob/master/client/public/assets/logo-abstract.png https://github.com/sidneywidmer/yass/blob/master/client/publ...
- slightknack 1y agoThe minimaxir/gemimg repo is pretty cool, fwiw. Going further, one thing you can do is give Gemini 2.5 a system prompt like the following: https://goto.isaac.sh/image-prompt https://goto.isaac.sh/image-prompt And then pass Gemini 2.5's output directly to Nano-Banana. Doing this yields very high-quality images. This is also good for style transfer and image combination. For example, if you then give Gemini 2.5 a user prompt that looks something like this: I would like to perform style transfer. I will provide the image generation model a photograph alongside your generated prompt. Please write a prompt to transfer the following style: {{ brief style description here }}. You can get aesthetic consistently-styled images, like these: https://goto.isaac.sh/image-style-transfer https://goto.isaac.sh/image-style-transfer
- skocznymroczny 1y agoI like to use these AI models for generating mockup screenshots of game. I can drop a "create a mockup screenshot of a steampunk 2D platformer in which you play as a robot" and it will give me some interesting screenshot. Then I can ask it to iterate on the style. Of course it's going to be broken in some ways and it's not even real pixel art, but it gives a good reference to quickly brainstorm some ideas. Unfortunately I have to use ChatGPT for this, for some reason local models don't do well with such tasks. I don't know if it's just the extra prompting sauce that ChatGPT does or just diffusion models aren't well designed for these kind of tasks.
- AgentMatt 1y agoGreat article! Regarding the generated cat image: > Each and every rule specified is followed. Not quite; the eye color and heterochromia is followed only so-so. The black-and-silver cat seems to have no heterochromia; eye color could be interpreted as silver though. The white-and-gold cat _does_ have heterochromia. The colors can be interpreted as "white" and "gold", though I'd describe them as whitish-blue and orange. What's interesting about this is an adjustment of the instructions toward biologically more plausible eye colors in the cat which also has more natural fur colors. The last cat's fur colors are so "implausible" that the model doesn't seem to have problems taking exactly those colors for the (heterochromatic) eyes too!
- Zopieux 1y ago>it is possible to generate NSFW images through Nano Banana—obviously I cannot provide examples. It is in fact not at all obvious why you can't. The American prudishness continues to boggle my mind.