Setup
Forty prompts, five categories: portraits, product photography, editorial fashion, text rendering, and instruction-following edits. Default settings, one seed per model, no cherry-picking.
Portraits
Flux 2 Pro still edges ahead for pure photorealism — skin subsurface, natural catch-lights, hair specularity. Nano Banana 2 is closer than any previous Google model but still occasionally over-smooths. Winner: Flux 2 Pro by a nose.
Product photography
Nano Banana 2 wins here. It respects product edges, brand-colour fidelity and reflective materials better than Flux by a noticeable margin. If you shoot ecommerce, this is the switch worth making.
Text rendering
Nano Banana 2 wins clearly. Two-line poster text stays legible; Flux still garbles anything over five words. Only Ideogram v3 still beats Nano Banana here.
Instruction-following edits
Nano Banana 2 Edit is the new leader — it interprets 'replace the mug with a green ceramic one' with far higher accuracy than Flux 2 Pro Edit. This alone justifies keeping it in the stack.
Verdict
The 2026 image workflow uses both. Reach for Flux 2 Pro for portrait and cinematic realism. Reach for Nano Banana 2 for product, text and any surgical edit. Ideogram stays in the toolbox for typography-heavy posters.
- Portraits & realism → Flux 2 Pro
- Product & packaging → Nano Banana 2
- Text on image → Nano Banana 2 / Ideogram v3
- Precise edits → Nano Banana 2 Edit
- Painterly / stylised → Flux 2 Pro or Recraft v3
Frequently asked
Is Nano Banana 2 the same as Gemini's image model?+
Yes. Nano Banana 2 is Google's public naming for the current generation of Gemini image generation. It uses the same underlying stack tuned for image output.
Which should a beginner learn first?+
Flux 2 Pro. It has the widest tutorial ecosystem and the most transferable prompt vocabulary. Add Nano Banana 2 once you understand what a keeper looks like.
Compare both models
Put this into practice in the studio — under a minute to your first result.
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