Nano Banana responds to structure, not enthusiasm. AI Central's Nano Banana Prompting Guide sets out six fill-in-the-slot templates for Google's fastest image model, covering photorealistic scenes, stickers, rendered text, product mockups, negative-space backgrounds and comic panels. Each template forces you to name a shot type, a lighting setup, a surface and an aspect ratio. Fill those slots and the model stops guessing. Leave them empty and it guesses, badly, and you blame the model.
Reviewed August 2026.
The problem is the prompt, not the model
Most people write image prompts the way they would describe a photo to a friend. A cool robot. A nice product shot. Something for the top of my deck.
Every one of those leaves the important decisions to the model. Lens, distance, light direction, background, framing, orientation. The model has a default for all of them, and the default is average, because average is what sits in the middle of the training data.
The guide's fix is a format, not a phrasing trick. It gives you a sentence with the decisions carved out as blanks, and asks you to fill them. That is the whole method.
The six jobs it covers
The guide is organised by outcome, and each section pairs a reusable template with a worked example. The six are these.
- Photorealistic scenes, where you specify shot type, environment, lighting, camera and lens.
- Stylized illustrations and stickers, where the style, line work, shading and colour palette are named, and a white background is requested explicitly.
- Accurate text inside an image, where you state the exact words, describe the font, and set the colour scheme.
- Product mockups, where you name a background surface, a studio lighting setup and a camera angle.
- Minimalist and negative-space design, where the subject is placed in a named corner of the frame and the rest is left deliberately empty.
- Sequential art, meaning single comic panels and storyboard frames, with foreground action, background setting and caption text separated out.
Think like a photographer, literally
On realism, AI Central states the mindset shift plainly rather than dressing it up.
For realistic images, think like a photographer. Mentioning camera angles, lens types, lighting, and fine details will guide the model toward a photorealistic result.
That is the load-bearing sentence in the entire guide. Photorealism is not a style you request, it is a set of physical constraints you describe, and the vocabulary that describes them belongs to photography.
The worked example proves the point better than the template does. It asks for a close-up portrait of an elderly Japanese ceramicist inspecting a freshly glazed tea bowl, in a rustic sun-drenched workshop, lit by soft golden hour light through a window, captured with an 85mm portrait lens, with a soft blurred background, vertical orientation.
Count what is specified there. A focal length. A time of day. A light source and its direction. A depth-of-field effect. A surface texture. An orientation. Not one of those is decoration. Each one closes off a set of images the model would otherwise be free to produce.
The constraints people keep forgetting
Three of the six sections exist mainly to stop a specific, repeated failure.
For stickers and icons, the guide is direct about the one people always miss.
To create stickers, icons, or assets for your projects, be explicit about the style and remember to request a white background if you need one.
That instruction from AI Central is there because a sticker generated without it arrives welded to a scene, and no amount of re-rolling fixes it. The background is a thing you ask for, not a thing you hope for.
For text, the burden is on you to describe the typeface rather than name one and hope it is honoured. The guide's logo example specifies the lettering weight, where the icon sits relative to the words, and a two-colour scheme of yellow and black.
For product shots, the template refuses to let you write nice lighting. It wants a named setup. Its example uses a three-point softbox arrangement to create soft diffused highlights and kill harsh shadows, shot from a slightly elevated 45-degree angle, focus pinned on condensation droplets. That is a brief you could hand to a studio.
Negative space is the section to steal first
The minimalist template is the most immediately useful one here for anyone not making art for its own sake, and the guide says why.
Excellent for creating backgrounds for websites, presentations, or marketing materials where text will be overlaid.
This is the difference between generating an image and generating an asset. A busy, beautiful image is unusable behind a headline. A single small subject placed in the mid-right of the frame, on a vast empty pastel canvas, with soft diffused light from the top left, is a slide background that a copywriter can work on top of.
The template asks you to name the corner. That one requirement is what makes the output composable, because you now know where the empty half of the frame will be before you generate it.
Where the guide leaves you on your own
Two honest gaps.
The sequential art section carries a full comic-panel template, with slots for art style, foreground action, background setting, caption text and mood. The example printed alongside it, though, repeats the minimalist cherry blossom prompt rather than demonstrating a panel. The template is sound, but that one you build yourself rather than copy.
The second gap is scope. The guide opens by describing Nano Banana as a model you can chat with to create, edit and combine images, and then teaches creation only. Editing an existing image and merging two images are the two things people most want after their first week, and neither gets a template here.
What to actually do with it
How you use these depends on where you are.
- If you are new to image generation, do not write prompts from scratch. Take one template, fill every slot, and generate. Resist deleting a slot because you are unsure what to put in it, that uncertainty is exactly what the model will resolve at random.
- If you already prompt daily, treat the six templates as a checklist rather than a script. Read your last failed prompt against the matching template and find the slot you left empty, it is almost always lighting or aspect ratio.
- If you work on a team, standardise on the two templates that map to your actual output, most likely product mockups and negative-space backgrounds, and store the filled versions with your palette and surfaces already baked in. That is a house style.
- Whatever your level, change one slot at a time when iterating. Rewriting the whole prompt after a bad result teaches you nothing about which word caused it.
The guide closes on a line worth keeping in front of you.
Nano Banana is a tool.
AI Central's point is that the model is not the differentiator. Everyone has the same one. The brief is the differentiator, and the brief is the part you control.
What makes a Nano Banana prompt photorealistic?
Naming the physical conditions of the shot rather than asking for realism as a style. The guide's recipe is shot type, subject and action, environment, lighting and the mood it creates, camera and lens details, key textures, and aspect ratio. Its example specifies an 85mm portrait lens and golden hour light through a window. That is the level of detail that separates a photo from a render.
Why does my sticker come out with a background?
Because you did not ask for it not to. The guide is explicit that a white background has to be requested in the prompt when you need one. Its sticker template ends with that requirement as a standing sentence rather than an option, alongside naming the line style, the shading style and the colour palette.
Can Nano Banana actually render readable text in an image?
The guide's position is that it does this well, and that the burden sits on the prompt. State the exact words, describe the font style descriptively rather than assuming a font name will be honoured, and set the design direction and colour scheme. Its worked example is a minimalist coffee shop logo with lettering, icon placement and a yellow and black scheme all specified.
I just need a background for a slide, which template do I use?
The minimalist and negative-space one. It asks for a single subject, the exact position of that subject in the frame, a vast empty background colour, and soft lighting with a stated direction. That produces an image with a deliberate empty region, which is what a headline needs to sit on. It is the one template in the guide built for text to be layered over the result.