Nano Banana: the Photoshop for the rest of us?

Google's new $20 monthly program can turn anyone into a Photoshop master

The good news about Google’s new Nano Banana AI tools: it can do wonders for simple photo edits, better probably than you could pull off and you don’t need to take classes to learn how to use it.

The bad news and the winner of our annual “Turkey of the Year” award goes to Google for quietly re-writing how we use the services that have long been mostly free. It’s turning from a ad-supported platform to a fully monthly subscription one, without most people even realizing it. You want to use Google? There’s a charge. You will be paying one way or the other.

Many of us pay now for Google Drive and Photos storage. My prediction: many more will be sucked in. Or in other words, you won’t be able to use Google unless you pay.

So what’s the big deal about Google’s Gemini’s latest version, (available as AI tools at gemini.google.com)? Here’s some of what it can do.

It can create silly time-wasters like the above cover. However, it took me four tries until Google finally got it right.

It can instantly colorize an old historical photo.

It can remove the trees from the back of this freeway sign in a matter of seconds, upon request.

It can take a photo and transform it into a colored pencil sketch.

It can make a Hallmark like drawing of the family, using a reference photo for guidance. Sometimes. It worked really well for my friend Alex, who fed Nano five different images of his family members to create this. I tried the same thing, over and over again, but got really poor results.

I asked it over and over again to make us all look like we really do, and it failed every time. Nice ice cream cone though!

You can ask Nano Banana to do silly things like have you stand with your favorite tech titans. This is the fourth try, and it just couldn’t get ol’ Steve Jobs and Tim Cook correct. Did a great job with the other two though.

And with every revision, it got worse and worse.

What Google says it can do

Create artwork and di photo editing at its core. But the trick is asking the right questions and being very specific, because it’s all in the prompt. Here’s an article Google released with seven tips for suggesting great prompts for Nano Banana.

Why this tool could help you.

Everything I’ve presented here today could have been done in Adobe’s Photoshop software, especially the basic photo edits, but five years ago it would have been painstaking and time consuming. Now, when it works, it’s done in seconds. If you want to do things like eliminate power lines and distracting objects in your photos, you can just ask Google to do it, and see a great looking photo without having to learn a complex software program. I found that it does way better in photo editing than with creating drawings and composites.

Pricing

You can use Nano Banana for free on the web at gemini.google.com or in the mobile Gemini app, but you only get to use it 100 times in a month. Otherwise, Google wants you to pay $19.99 monthly, but here’s where you have to be very careful. Google offers a “free” 30-day trial, but once you click the button, if you subscribe to Google Drive, like I do, that subscription is superseded by the new one. So when I tried to cancel it, I got this awful message from the Google Turkeys that I was also ditching Google Drive—a tool I use every day. The only solution: ditch the Google AI, my Drive (with 2 TBs of data in it) gets canceled, and I quickly re-subscribe to Google Drive before Google deletes my data. (Don’t worry, I downloaded everything over a period of days to make sure evil Google couldn’t do that.)

OUR GIVEAWAY WINNER!

Angela Marquez, who co-owns a sawmill and makes custom wood products (like cutting boards and serving trays) with her husband (JandARusticProducts) in tiny Ruidoso, NM (pop. 95) is the winner of our giveaway with Lieber’s Luggage for the official Photowalks edition of its carry-on suitcase.

Angela tells us she loves to travel with her husband, and will be going to St. Vincent in April and Alaska in June. She took the above photo of the Coliseum in Rome on an iPhone 16 Pro, and was savvy enough to see how it looked in the daytime, and return later for a night shot.

“I’m honored to win,” she says. And we’re honored that you took the time, along with so many others, to register and submit the great photo.

We have another Giveaway for readers and viewers, this time with a major hotel company, and I’ll announce it in tomorrow’s newsletter, so stay tuned.

We’re back with another great road trip episode of Photowalks Sunday at 10 a.m. PT on Scripps News. Don’t forget to tune in the show, wherever you get your streaming.

—Jeff