One of the first real life use cases of generative image generation was when approximately one year ago the flux model with LoRa training made a huge impression in the AI and creative community. It was the first time possible to generate AI images that more or less look like the person trained with the LoRa step. And of course everyone put himself in the fanciest or absurdest places. Besides all the nonsense a really sustainable use case was the generation of professional head-shot that can save you real money as there is no need to visit a professional photographer any more.
I year later we saw a lot of improvements and new models arise that are capable of doing similar things (eg. put a person into random places/situations) without the need of a extra training step. Google nano banana made a huge impression some weeks ago, but similar output were also already possible in spring when openai launched their gpt-image-1 model.
Here is a real life example I have created using Google’s nano banana model in AI studio:
{
“prompt”: “GQ-style portrait of you smiling contently into the camera. use the outfit from the 2nd image and apply it to the person. Transform this portrait into a high-end editorial photo styled for a GQ magazine cover. Use cinematic studio lighting, glossy highlights, and elegant muted color grading. Keep skin naturally with ultra-detailed textures, enhance contrast, and create a luxury fashion aesthetic. Maintain a clean, minimal background with negative space, centered composition, and polished tones. Output in 8k ultra-realistic quality, crisp, vibrant, and cover-ready.”,
“negative_prompt”: “blurry, low quality, distorted face, text, logos, watermarks, extra limbs, artifacts, overexposed, poorly lit, cartoonish”,
“style”: “luxury editorial photography”,
“resolution”: “8k”,
“composition”: “centered subject, clean background, cover-ready framing”,
“lighting”: “cinematic studio lighting with soft shadows and glossy highlights”,
“output_type”: “photo”
}
The result
The result is pretty impressive considering the inputs I gave the model and how the pose, background and clothing was realized. I cannot be fully happy how my face was drawn by the AI – that is not 100% me.
Comparing to the flux/LoRa images I created ~1 year ago
Coming back to the professional head-shots I mentioned at the beginning and were a little bit harder to produce in terms of working with the AI. But except for the image in the middle I can clearly say that my face was well drawn this times and it actually feels like me. There were flaws with flux, like the model puts you always a couple of times into the image (see last picture: the guy in the black sweater is again me) but with some prompt magic, those things were also solvable.
The way forward…
My impression is that there is a lot of efforts put into from the big AI players to create advanced image and video models which will bring us even further in possibilities. Character consistence is still a topic that also is almost solved in latest model. In contrary it opens up also the possibilities for easy accessible and hard to recognize image manipulation and miss-use of the tools in all kind of ways.
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