Category Archives: Nano Banana

Phota launches, promising maximum identity preservation

AI/ML, Nano Banana, Photography

Phota—about which I expressed some initial misgivings, given its ability to rewrite memories—has launched Phota Studio & their API. From what I can tell, it builds upon a Nano Banana foundation and adds personalization that relies on uploading dozens of images of each individual in order to maximize identity preservation:

With Phota, for the first time, you can generate, edit, and enhance photos while keeping your identity intact, every time.

We’re not building a generic foundation model. We build personal models about you, and about the people and pets around you. At the center are profiles, built from your personal album that learn the details of your appearance that make you recognizable as yourself: how you smile, your eye color, and how your face looks from different angles. Your personal model is private and only used by you.

Here’s a quick thread in which I tried inserting myself into a couple of images, using both Phota’s model (which depended on my uploading 30+ images of myself) and just Nano Banana straight out of the Gemini app:

Tips: Getting great text from Nano Banana

AI/ML, Nano Banana, Typography

Structuring your prompt well turns out to be key in avoiding garbled text. As the presenter says, “It’s not about writing more. It’s about writing in the right order.” Check out this brief overview.

In this tutorial, you’ll see how to use Nano Banana Pro and Kling 3.0 Omni together to solve one of the most common pain points in AI product video: text that blurs, warps, or drifts mid-motion. We’ll walk through a practical workflow for maintaining legibility and visual consistency in product shots, so your labels, logos, and copy stay clean from the first frame to the last.

Can AI finally generate useful vectors?

AI/ML, Illustration, Nano Banana

When we launched Firefly three years ago (!), we talked up prompt-based vector creation. When the feature later arrived in Illustrator, it was really text-to-image-to-tracing. That could be fine, actually, provided that the conversion process did some smart things around segmenting the image, moving objects onto their own layers, filling holes, and then harmoniously vectorizing the results. I’m not sure whether Adobe actually got around to shipping that support.

In any case, Recraft now promises create vector creation directly from prompts:

Meanwhile Gemini promises SVG creation right out of the box. My previous attempts to use it produced results that were, um, impressionistic…

…and based on what they’re showing vis-à-vis recent updates, I haven’t been in a hurry to try again:

Nano Banana goes to the Super Bowl

AI/ML, Nano Banana

It’s hard to believe that when I dropped by Google in 2022, arguing vociferously that we work together to put Imagen into Photoshop, they yawned & said, “Can you show up with nine figures?”—and now they’re spending eight figures on a 60-second ad to promote the evolved version of that tech. Funny ol’ world…

“We Can Imagine It For You Wholesale”

Miscellaneous, Nano Banana

“It’s not that you’re not good enough, it’s just that we can make you better.”

So sang Tears for Fears, and the line came to mind as the recently announced PhotaLabs promised to show “your reality, but made more magical.” That is, they create the shots you just missed, or wish you’d have taken:

Honestly, my first reaction was “ick.” I know that human memory is famously untrustworthy, and photos can manipulate it—not even through editing, but just through selective capture & curation. Even so, this kind of retroactive capture seems potentially deranging. Here’s the date you wish you’d gone on; here’s the college experience you wish you’d had.

I’m reminded of the Nathaniel Hawthorne quote featured on the Sopranos:

No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

Like, at what point did you take these awkward sibling portraits…? 


And, hey, darn if I can resist the devil’s candy: I wasn’t able to capture a shot of my sons together with their dates, so off I went to a combo of Gemini & Ideogram. I honestly kinda love the results, and so down the cognitive rabbit hole I slide… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Of course, depending on how far all this goes, the following tweet might prove to be prophetic:

Insane Nano Banana style transfer

AI/ML, Nano Banana

As I’m fond of noting, only thing more incredible than witchcraft like this is just how little notice people now take of it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But Imma keep noticing!

Two years ago (i.e. an AI eternity, obvs), I was duly impressed when, walking around a model train show with my son, DALL•E was able to create art kinda-sorta in the style of vintage boxes we beheld:

I still think that’s amazing—and it is!—but check out how far we’ve come. At a similar gathering yesterday, I took the photo below…

…and then uploaded it to Gemini with the following prompt: “Please create a stack of vintage toy car boxes using the style shown in the attached picture. The cars should be a silver 1990 Mazda Miata, a red 2003 Volkswagen Eurovan, a blue 2024 Volvo XC90, and a gray 2023 BMW 330.” And boom, head shot, here’s what it made:

I find all this just preposterously wonderful, and I hope I always do.

As Einstein is said to have remarked, “There are only two ways to live your life: one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is.”

Visualizing conversations with Nano Banana

AI/ML, Illustration, Infographics, Nano Banana

The ever thoughtful Blaise Agüera y Arcas (CTO of Technology & Society at Google) recently sat down for a conversation with the similarly deep-thinking Dan Faggella. I love that I was able to get Gemini to render a high-level view of the talk:

My workflow, FWIW:

  • Use Gemini in Chrome to create a summary.
  • Open it in Gemini & copy it to a Google Doc.
  • Open the doc in NotebookLM & specify infographic creation preferences.
  • Download image, open it in Gemini, and refine likenesses by uploading images of each speaker.
  • Make minor tweaks in Photoshop to deal with the aspect ratio changing (a subtle & intermittent but annoying bug).

Here’s the stimulating chat itself:

Continue reading →

Gemini/Nano Banana promises SVG generation

AI/ML, Illustration, Nano Banana

Creating clean vectors has proven to be an elusive goal. Firefly in Illustrator still (to my knowledge) just generates bitmaps which then get vectorized. Therefore this tweet caught my attention:

In my very limited testing so far, however, results have been, well, impressionistic. 🙂

Here’s a direct comparison of my friend Kevin’s image (which I received as an image) vectorized via Image Trace (way more points than I’d like, but generally high fidelity), vs. the same one converted to SVG via Gemini(clean code/lines, but large deviation from the source drawing):

But hey, give it time. For now I love seeing the progress!

Demo: Flux vs. Nano Banana inside Photoshop

AI/ML, Nano Banana

I recently shared a really helpful video from Jesús Ramirez that showed practical uses for each model inside Photoshop (e.g. text editing via Flux). Now here’s a direct comparison from Colin Smith, highlighting these strengths:

  • Flux: Realistic, detailed; doesn’t produce unwanted shifts in regions that should stay unchanged. Tends to maintain more of the original image, such as hair or background elements.
  • Nano Banana: Smooth & pleasing (if sometimes a bit “Disney”); good at following complex prompts. May be better at removing objects.

These specific examples are great, but I continue to wish for more standardized evals that would help produce objective measures across models. I’m investigating the state of the art there. More to share soon, I hope!

Demo: Specific, practical uses of Flux + Nano Banana inside Photoshop

AI/ML, Nano Banana

Twitter (yes, always “Twitter”) can be useful, but a ton of the AI-related posts there are often fairly superficial and/or impractical rehashes of eye candy that garners attention & not much else.

By contrast, Photoshop expert Jesús Ramirez has put together a really solid, nutrient-dense tour—complete with all his prompts—that I think you’ll find immediately useful. Dive on in, or jump directly to one of the topics linked below.

I particularly like this demo of using Flux to modify the text in an image:

Continue reading →

Photoshop integrates Flux, Nano Banana

AI/ML, Nano Banana

I’m so happy to see Adobe greatly accelerating the pace of 3p API integrations!

Google Flow adds Nano Banana

AI/ML, Nano Banana

In addition to adding support for vertical video & greater character consistency, the new Veo-powered storytelling tool now includes direct image creation & manipulation via tiny, tiny fruit:

“Ruining” art with Nano Banana

AI/ML, Illustration, Nano Banana

But, y’know, in a fun & cheeky way. 🙂 Check out this little iterative experiment from Ethan Mollick:

As a longtime Bosch enthusiast, I’m partial to this one:

Reminds me of the time in 2023 (i.e. 10,000 AI years ago) that I forced DALL•E to keep making images look more & more “cheugy”:

Nano Banana is coming to Photoshop—officially!

AI/ML, Miscellaneous, Nano Banana

“Yes, And”: It’s the golden rule of improv comedy, and it’s the title of the paper I wrote & circulated throughout Adobe as soon as DALL•E dropped 3+ years ago: yes, we should make our own great models, and of course we should integrate the best of what the rest of the world is making! I mean, duh, why wouldn’t we??

This stuff can take time, of course (oh, so much time), but here we are: Adobe has announced that Google’s Nano Banana editing model will be coming to a Photoshop beta build near you in the immediate future.

Side note: it’s funny that in order to really upgrade Photoshop, one of the key minds behind Firefly simply needed to quit the company, move to Google, build Nano Banana, and then license it back to Adobe. Funny ol’ world…

Barber, gimme the “Kling-Nano Banana…”

AI/ML, Nano Banana

And yes, I do feel like I’m having a stroke when I type our actual phrases like that. 🙂 But putting that aside, check out the hairstyling magic that can come from pairing Google’s latest image-editing model with an image-to-video system: