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Comment by plomme | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time I really don't understand how people are getting good results. On https://aistudio.google.com with Nano Banana selected (gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview) I get - garbage - results. I'll upload a character reference photo and a scene and ask Gemini to place the character in the scene. What it then does is to simply cut and paste the character into the scene, even if they are completely different in style, colours, etc.

I get far better results using ChatGPT for example. Of course, the character seldom looks anything like the reference, but it looks better than what I could do in paint in two minutes.

Am I using the wrong model, somehow??

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No, I've noticed the same.

When Nano Banana works well, it really works -- but 90% of the time the results will be weird or of poor quality, with what looks like cut-and-paste or paint-over, and it also refuses a lot of reasonable requests on "safety" grounds. (In my experience, almost anything with real people.)

I'm mostly annoyed, rather than impressed, with it.

Ok this answers my question to the nature of the page. As in: Are these examples that show results you get when using certain inputs and prompts. Or are these impressive lucky on offs.

I was a bit surprised to see quality. Last time I played around with image generation is a few months back and I’m more in the frustration camp. Not to say that I believe some people with more time and dedication at their hand can tickle better results.

From having used Nano Banana over the past few days, I think that they're extremely cherry-picked, and that each one is probably the result of multiple (probably a dozen+) attempts.

In my experience, Nano Banana would actively copy and paste if it thinks it's fine to do so. You need to explicitly prompt that the character should be seamlessly integrated into the scene or similar. In the other words, the model is superb when properly prompted especially compared to other models, but prompting itself can be annoying from time to time.

There's a good reference up in the comments: https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing

which goes to show that some of these amazing results might need 18 attempts and such.

Play around with your prompt, try ask Gemini 2.5 pro to improve your prompt before sending it to Gemini 2.5 Flash, retry and learn what works and what doesn't.

I understand the results are non deterministic but I get absolute garbage too.

Uploaded pics of my (32 years old) wife and we wanted to ask it to give her a fringe/bangs to see how would she look like it either refused "because of safety" and when it complied results were horrible, it was a different person.

After many days and tries we got it to make one but there was no way to tweak the fringe, the model kept returning the same pic every time (with plenty of "content blocked" in between).

Are you in gemini.google.com interface? If so, try Google AI Studio instead, there you can disable safety filters.

I use ai studio, no way to disable the filters.

Seedream 4.0 is not always better than Gemini Flash 2.5 (nano-banana), but when it is better, there is a gulf in performance (and when it's not, it's very close.)

It's also cheaper than Gemini, and has way fewer spurious content warnings, so overall I'm done with Gemini

No, that's just result of TONS of resets until you get something decent. 99% of the time you'll get trash, but that 1% is cool

It's not just you and there's a ton of gaslighting and astroturfing happening with Nano Banana. Thanks to this article we can even attempt to reproduce their exact inputs and lo and behold the results are much worse. I tried a bunch of them and got far worse results than the author. I assume they are trying the same prompts again and again until they get something slightly useful.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/aSbOVz5

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