I gave Google’s new Nano Banana Pro a try, and it immediately took my clothes off. I didn’t ask it to, but the AI model evidently decided my greetings card would look better with more skin.
Nano Banana Pro is, as the name suggests, aimed at professionals. Powered by Gemini 3, it’s effectively an upgrade of the company’s popular image generation and editing tool that went viral in a social media trend that turned selfies into hyperrealistic 3D figurines. Google says it lets you create higher quality images that you can print, render legible text onto pictures, and blend multiple images together into a single composition. It’s also meant for “people who want to feel like professionals,” Naina Raisinghani, a product manager at Google DeepMind, told The Verge. That sounds good, because I am by no means a professional. For me, the results were glossy, but goofy. It looked good, but felt amateurish.
Using Nano Banana Pro is pretty simple: you go into the Gemini app, select “create images,” and toggle on the ‘thinking’ mode. Just plug in your prompt (and image, if you’re using one) and go. It’s also free, though there are limits, with quotas expanding for Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers.
Google makes some bold claims, promising “studio-quality designs,” “flawless text rendering,” and a host of nifty and creative edits. To test these, I uploaded a simple photo of myself near The Verge’s office in New York with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. I asked Gemini to change the lighting from day to night and it did a pretty good job. The result looks believable. It even handled details that often trip up image generators, like having cars go in the right direction. Adjusting the camera angle was equally easy. I asked Gemini to recreate the shot as if it were taken from a higher angle on the right and it did.
Image: The Verge and Image: The Verge / Google, Nano Banana Pro
Google also says Nano Banana Pro can create infographics and diagrams to help visualize real-time information like weather or sports. Being British, I asked about the weather for the next four days in Washington, DC, and New York City, where I currently am. Visually, the infographic would’ve been at home on a basic forecast site. The text and numbers appeared normal — a far cry from the garbled nonsense you often see in AI-generated images — and Gemini gave me a list of citations at the end that helped me confirm it was accurate.
The model stumbled a little on more complex tasks. I asked it to summarize a recent Verge story about how Europe is scaling back its AI and privacy laws in a comic book-style format. The images and text were indeed rendered flawlessly in a cartoonish font, but the comic didn’t summarize the story at all, giving a vague overview of the bloc’s AI Act instead. The issue may have been because I gave Gemini a link to the story, rather than pasting the text in.
Image: The Verge / Google, Nano Banana Pro
It gave me a passable comic-style summary when I did. It communicated the gist of the actual story, though I don’t think I’d have been able to understand easily had I not written the source material. It also made up phrases that didn’t appear anywhere in my article.
Image: The Verge / Google
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