A short prompt guide for Nano Banana Pro

Nano Banana Pro is Google’s most capable image model — a reasoning engine wearing an image generator’s coat. It thinks before it draws, which means it rewards prompts that read like a brief to a designer rather than a list of keywords. Text comes out legible, infographics come out factually correct, and edits stay surgical instead of re-rolling the whole frame. Here’s how to get the most out of it.

The five things that matter most

1. Write the brief, not the keywords. Nano Banana Pro understands intent. Tell it the purpose of the image, then the subject, action, environment, style, and lighting. Coherent sentences beat keyword soup — and a clear goal up front beats six sentences of decoration.

Good: Design a viral YouTube thumbnail for a cooking channel — energetic, high contrast, big face reaction. The host holds up a steaming pan and looks straight at the camera.
Avoid: YouTube thumbnail, food, chef, surprised face, bright colors.

2. Quote any text you want rendered. Nano Banana Pro’s text rendering is state-of-the-art, in over a dozen languages — but only if it knows what’s text and what’s description. Use double quotes, specify the typography, and keep rendered phrases short for reliability.

Good: A minimalist event poster with the headline “Late Show: 9pm Friday” set in a bold condensed sans-serif, centred at the top.
Avoid: A minimalist event poster about a late show on Friday at 9pm.

3. Use positive framing. Describe what you want, not what you don’t. “Empty street” beats “no cars”. “Plain background” beats “no clutter”. The model is better at adding the thing you named than negating the thing you didn’t want.

4. Speak camera and lighting. Nano Banana Pro understands photographic and cinematic vocabulary precisely. “Low-angle close-up, 35mm lens, shallow depth of field, golden-hour backlight” lands; “cinematic vibe” doesn’t.

5. Edit surgically. When you’re iterating on a generation, name what to change and what to preserve. The model is much better at surgical edits than re-rolling — “keep the composition and pose, swap the lighting to overcast” will hold the rest of the frame steady; “try again but moodier” will give you a different image.

Text-to-image

Nano Banana Pro is built on Gemini 3, which means it has real-world knowledge baked in. That’s a step change for diagrams, posters, packaging, and anything that has to be both visually right and factually right.

Prompt: A clean, modern infographic explaining the water cycle for a primary-school classroom. Lay out four labelled stages around a central illustration: “Evaporation”, “Condensation”, “Precipitation”, “Collection”, with subtle directional arrows showing the flow between them. Use a warm pastel palette, friendly geometric icons, and a hand-set sans-serif headline at the top reading “How Water Moves”.

For storytelling and editorial scenes, describe every element you care about. Nano Banana Pro will arrange them — but it won’t invent the arrangement for you.

Prompt: A cosy reading nook by a rain-streaked window, late-afternoon light. A worn leather armchair holds a half-open novel face-down on its arm. On the side table: a ceramic mug of tea with steam curling from it, reading glasses folded beside it, a small brass lamp throwing a warm pool of light onto the floorboards. A tabby cat asleep on a tartan blanket at the foot of the chair. Tall bookshelf softly out of focus in the background. Shot on a 35mm lens, shallow depth of field, moody but warm.

Posters, packaging, and product shots

This is where Nano Banana Pro pulls ahead of every other image model. Sharp, legible, multilingual text renders cleanly straight out of the model — no inpainting pass, no post-processing.

A few rules that hold consistently:

Quote the exact words. The headline reads “Spring Collection 2026”.
Specify the typeface family, not the font name. Bold geometric sans-serif, elegant serif with subtle ligatures, handwritten brush script.
Place the text. Centred at the top, bottom-left corner, integrated into the layout above the model’s shoulder.
Keep rendered phrases short. Three to seven words is the sweet spot. Long paragraphs work, but legibility tightens up when you’re concise.

Prompt: Editorial product photograph of a matte-black coffee tin on weathered oak, soft window light from the left. The label reads “NIGHTWING ROASTERS” in small-caps serif, with “Single Origin · Ethiopia” set beneath it in a finer italic. Scattered coffee beans and a folded linen napkin in the foreground. Shallow depth of field, magazine commercial quality.

Surgical edits — restyle without re-rolling

In the studio, click any past generation to use it as the input for your next prompt. Nano Banana Pro is designed for the edit-first workflow, and it rewards prompts that name the change and the things to preserve.

Add: Add a pair of tortoiseshell round glasses to the man. Keep his expression and hair exactly the same.
Remove: Remove the coffee cup from the desk. Keep everything else identical, including lighting and shadows.
Replace: Replace the red bicycle with a matte-black vintage motorcycle, matching the same camera angle and key light.
Modify: Swap the lighting from overcast daylight to golden-hour backlight. Keep the subject’s pose, expression, and outfit unchanged.
Re-aspect: Change the aspect ratio to 16:9 by expanding the background. The character remains exactly locked in its current position.

For tricky regions, sketching on the image works. Upload an annotated version with arrows or a circled area and reference it directly: “place a floor lamp where the red circle is marked, matching the room’s existing warm tungsten lighting.” Nano Banana Pro reads visual cues alongside the text.

Multi-reference composition

Attach up to fourteen reference images and assign each one a role. Nano Banana Pro is unusually good at honouring those assignments — but only if you label them explicitly. Image 1, Image 2, and so on, with a noun for what each contributes.

Prompt: Generate a high-end fashion editorial: dress the subject from Image 1 in the silk gown from Image 2, on the rooftop location from Image 3, lit in the style of Image 4 (golden-hour backlight, soft fill). Preserve the subject’s exact facial features, hair, and skin tone. Studio-quality detail, shallow depth of field.

A few common shapes:

Character + outfit: The face and build from Image 1, the outfit from Image 2.
Subject + environment: Place the character from Image 1 into the location shown in Image 2, matching its existing lighting.
Style transfer: Render Image 1 in the painting style of Image 2 — preserve subject and composition, transfer brushwork and palette.
Sketch to render: Follow the layout of the sketch in Image 1. Render in the photographic style of Image 2.

The more references you attach, the more important explicit role assignment becomes. “The cape”, “the goggles”, “the background” — name everything. Nano Banana Pro is happy to listen; it just needs to know which reference supplies what.

Resolution: 2K for the web, 4K for print

Nano Banana Pro renders natively at 2K and 4K in the Maejik studio. Pick 2K for anything destined for screens — social, web, slide decks, mockups. Reach for 4K when you need print-ready detail, large-format display, or you’re going to crop in heavily. Aspect ratio and resolution are set in the studio’s controls, so don’t write them into the prompt itself.

If you get stuck

Hit the prompt touch-up button in the studio. It rewrites your prompt into the kind of structured, intent-led language Nano Banana Pro responds to — quoting your rendered text, naming camera and lighting, and tightening loose phrasing — without changing what you asked for. Use it as a starting point and tweak from there.

Bring a prompt and sign up — new accounts start with free credits, no card required.