nano-banana-pro-prompting

Nano Banana Pro → write the brief, not the adjectives

Google describes Nano Banana Pro as planning a composition before it paints one: it settles the layout and the lighting, and only then commits to pixels. Two things follow. It can reason a picture out — a solved equation on a whiteboard, a process diagram in the right order — and it gets sharper the more it knows about the job, so one sentence of context beats one more adjective.

Reach it with find_model for text_to_image or image_to_image, then generate_image / edit_image. Nothing below is a parameter; it is all prompt text.

The generation brief

Eight slots. Fill the ones the shot needs, in this order:

Slot	What goes in it
Subject	Who or what, in concrete terms
Action	What the subject is doing
Setting	Place, time of day, the light in the room
Style	The finished look, photoreal through flat illustration
Composition and camera	Framing, angle, lens behaviour — brief it like a photographer
Lighting and colour	How it is lit, and the grade
Text	Any words on the image, in quotes
Constraints	What stays out of frame ("no hands, no logos, no hotspots")

A filled brief:

A matte-black stainless steel insulated water bottle, 750ml, slim cylindrical body, brushed metal cap. It stands upright on a wet slate countertop, a few condensation droplets sliding down its side, mid-morning, in a quiet kitchen by a north-facing window, soft overcast daylight from the left. Photoreal high-end commercial product photography. Tight three-quarter hero shot, slightly below eye level so the bottle reads tall, 85mm at f/8 so the whole product stays sharp while the background falls into soft blur. One large softbox left, a subtle reflector right to control falloff; cool desaturated grade, clean neutral whites, a faint blue cast in the shadows. The words "STAY COLD. 24 HOURS." in small caps along the lower third. No other props, no hands, no visible brand logos, no harsh specular hotspots on the metal.

Add a line about who the image is for when you have one. "This is for a high-end cookbook" sends the planning step toward shallow focus and careful plating on its own.

The edit brief

Edits drift the moment you stop describing what stays. Four slots, and the first one is the whole trick:

• Lock — everything that must not move. Face and layout first, then the details you would notice missing: a finish, a text line, the droplets, the angle.
• Change — the single thing you are altering.
• Amount — how far to take it.
• Constraints — what the edit must not break.

Lock: the water bottle — matte-black finish, brushed cap, slim cylindrical body, the "STAY COLD. 24 HOURS." text, the condensation droplets, its size and position in frame, the three-quarter hero angle. Change: swap the kitchen-counter background for a flat grey boulder beside a sunlit mountain trail. Amount: full environment swap, understated — soft natural daylight, not golden hour; shot on location, not composited. Constraints: don't relight or recolour the bottle beyond the new ambient light; no new reflections or hotspots on the metal; keep the original cool grade; don't touch the cap, droplets or text; no hands, people or gear in frame.

One change per call. Ten edits in one sentence is how you lose track of which one broke the image. Re-state the lock list on every pass.

Rules that keep it from reading as AI

• Adjectives do not render. "Stunning" draws nothing; overcast light and chipped paint draw something.
• Pin style words to something concrete. "Cinematic" drifts; "a teal-and-amber grade with hard shadows" does not.
• Name the real thing. If the shot needs a boarding pass, the words "boarding pass" beat any amount of mood language.
• Wrap on-image text in quotes and call out the typeface and its position. When the model keeps dropping a letter, spell the word out. That is for a poster or a mockup that ships as an image; a still headed for a timeline, or a storyboard keyframe, keeps its copy off the picture and gets it as a text clip afterwards (caption-titles), where it stays editable.

The contrast is the whole lesson. "A gorgeous hyper-detailed photo of a potter, masterpiece, cinematic, 8k" gives the model nothing to decide against. "A ceramicist in her 40s centering wet clay on a spinning wheel in a cluttered studio, late-afternoon light raking across the workbench, grey slip drying on her forearms, a row of unglazed bowls on the shelf behind her, eye-level at 50mm with shallow focus, muted earth tones" is a list of decisions the model no longer has to invent.

Patterns worth reaching for

• Typography and posters — name the print process, the ink colours, the exact words in quotes, the type class and its position: "risograph gig poster, two-colour overprinted teal and burnt orange, visible halftone, 'BLUE ROOM SESSIONS' large in a condensed slab serif across the top, 'Thursdays, 9pm' in small monospace at the bottom, slightly misregistered".
• Infographics and diagrams — this is where the planning step pays. Ask for a labelled cross-section or a bar comparison, name the palette and the type class, and end with "keep every label legible".
• Directing the shot — one hard light source, named falloff, a named lens: "lit by one hard source from a window at camera left, deep falloff into shadow, a thin rim along the fruit's edge, macro so the waxy skin reads".
• Wireframe to screen (edit) — "use the attached pencil wireframe as the exact layout"; then the palette, the type class and the copy.
• Storyboards — ask for N panels in one image, name the medium ("loose black-and-white marker sketches") and vary the framing across the panels.
• Object swap (edit) — swap the object, then list the scene, the light, the depth of field, the palette and the existing shadows as unchanged, and ask for matched scale, texture and contact shadows.

What the model brings

The vendor's guide says resemblance holds for up to 5 people across generations and edits, so recurring characters in a campaign or a storyboard are workable. Several reference images combine in one generation for style or a multi-image scene: Replicate's google/nano-banana-pro takes up to 14 and kie's nano-banana-pro up to 8. Text-to-image and edit are the same model. Google states that outputs carry SynthID watermarking.

Grade the result rather than eyeballing it: critique_image for a written read, score_image_adherence when you need the prompt checked against the render.

Adapted from fal's Nano Banana Pro prompting guide: https://fal.ai/learn/tools/nano-banana-pro-prompting-guide