I swapped studio headshots for this Google feature at home — and it actually works

Taking headshots has never been simple for me. Although I’m decent at posing, the camera disagrees.

It takes a professional to truly capture my angles and expressions. That’s why I rarely let anyone else take my pictures.

I have my own mini photography setup, which includes my phone, tripod, ring light, and remote shutter. I’ve made do with my own editing, but it’s never quite felt seamless.

My recent tour into Google’s experimental AI tools has exposed me to some surprisingly capable utilities. I hope many of them stick around.

Nano Banana, in particular, has helped me take polished pictures for LinkedIn and other platforms. Here’s why I can’t put it down.

How a random Instagram post led me to discover Nano Banana

The one time that aimlessly scrolling brought useful results

Doomscrolling isn’t always a total waste of time.

Case in point, I was scrolling through my Instagram feed when I saw an image whose style is now so generic that I can no longer copy it.

You may have noticed it. It’s usually a photo of someone seated on a tall wooden stool against a plain, muted green background.

They wear a light beige button-up shirt paired with white pants. The lighting is soft, and the overall composition is studio-style.

At first, I almost fell for it. But then I recognized the person in the photo and realized that wasn’t actually how they looked in real life. That triggered my curiosity.

I checked the caption, and sure enough, they’d explained it was AI-generated. That’s when I knew we were in trouble.

Artificial intelligence has become so good we can’t easily spot it anymore.

Thankfully, the user shared the exact prompt they’d used, and I got to work immediately. I raced to the Nano Banana website and began experimenting.

Nano Banana is a multimodal AI-powered image tool that generates or edits content based on text prompts and references. You may also create images, videos, or audio from scratch.

It’s free to use, and currently exists only as a web app. Normally, there’s a 100-prompt cap. But Google may have removed it.

Surprisingly, it runs on the same Gemini 2.5 Flash model as the Gemini app on the Play Store. Gemini 2.5 Flash is the mid-tier version of Google’s architecture. So, you can still use the mobile app for image editing.

By default, you’ll use its incognito setting on the web. Your session history won’t save locally in your browser.

If you want the AI Studio to remember your prompts and outputs, log in to your Google account and connect to Drive.

Nano Banana turns prompts into expert portraits

You’ll have enough deepfakes to save you costly studio sessions

During my test, I screen-grabbed the aforementioned user’s post caption. Then I used Google Lens to extract the text.

I pasted it into Nano Banana along with a personal photo from my gallery. I instructed the tool to create a studio headshot while keeping the subject exactly the same.

It was only supposed to change the background and emulate a prime lens around 50mm. It should also keep a moderately wide aperture, around f/2.8 to f/4, with me as the focus.

I was able to replicate a sharp and lifelike image, although it took several reiterations before it got my twin. A stranger would hardly know it was formulated, unless they had keen eyes.

Later, I asked Nano banana to remove the background from a selfie I’d taken in my storage closet. The AI did a clean job, leaving a near-perfect empty background.

On one occasion, I attached an outfit from Pinterest, alongside my picture, and it generated me in the outfit perfectly.

Here are some examples of the prompts I’ve used:

Example prompt #1: Generate an image of me in the attached outfit. I’m crossing my arms professionally and gazing directly at the viewer. I’m seated on a brown stool in a photo studio. Use softbox or diffused front-side lighting for gentle shadows and even tones. Simulate an 85mm lens at f/2.8 or f/4 aperture and apply the rule of thirds with the subject slightly off-center. Keep the exact facial features and hairstyle. Don’t alter the face. Make it look realistic.

Example prompt #2: Remove the objects from my current background and replace them with a plain [color] wall. Keep the subject exactly the same. The new background must look lifelike, as if the photo ewere taken in front of an actual wall.

Example prompt #3: Make a glamorous luxury birthday portrait of me, using my real face and features, with a warm golden-brown glow. I’m reclining on a mirrored floor in a crystal-encrusted champagne-gold corset gown. Behind me shines a golden fire love symbol. My makeup should be flawless, and my entire outfit should have a regal aura to complete the high-fashion, celestial celebration scene.

AI is as effective as you tell it to be

Don’t prompt A and expect B

Nano Banana creates stunning results in photo editing when guided properly. When not, one of its biggest struggles is generating a new background.

I would stick to plain or minimal scenes. They’re less likely to expose any form of deception because there’s less spatial reasoning involved.

Ask the tool to mimic you in a park or café with people around, and it may give itself away. It doesn’t fully understand three-dimensional space the way cameras do.

Instead, it would predict what each pixel should look like based on learned patterns from millions of photos.

You also don’t want to go overboard with reflections for that same reason. If there’s a mirror, polished floor, or window in your scene, your body double may not line up perfectly.

If you’re asking the AI to make a full-body image, give it a full-body photo to work with. Uploading a selfie means that it’ll invent a body that doesn’t look like yours.

It’s expected because photographers do work that cannot be canned. I don’t think Nano Banana will ever be a full replacement for that craft.

Still, it works in your favor when it’s giving you a headache to do the financial math of booking one, especially impromptu. A single outfit session for headshots cost me $100.

That said, Nano Banana can still have a place in reality when used honestly. Use it for outfit ideation to see how different styles or colors might look before buying or wearing them.

It’s also handy for content planning when you want to test a few poses and setups before booking a real shoot.

Prompt your reality responsibly

It’s impressive how far Google’s machines have come. I normally tinker with ChatGPT to make similar edits. But with OpenAI upping its model pricing tiers, Google seems to have found the perfect gap to steal the generation market.

The hype around Nano Banana is growing so much that the company is integrating it into Google Photos. You won’t have to visit the website or upload to Gemini every time.

However, I’m worried about its many cons. For one, authenticity will no longer mean anything. Every photo will start looking the same and miss the charm of imperfection.

To their credit, Google tries to stay ahead of this. It has embedded metadata and subtle digital watermarks on its AI-generated images. But it took me less than a minute to erase one using something as basic as PicsArt’s Remove tool.