Neither model wins outright — they win different tasks. Nano Banana Pro is the strongest image model for lighting rendering, making it the pick for hero frames and lit product shots. GPT-Image-2 is better at text and design rendering and at realistic environments, and it accepts reference image attachments. The best documented results chain both.
Pick the model by task, not by reputation. Nano Banana Pro's edge is lighting: it renders light behavior — reflections, falloff, mood — better than any other image model, which is why documented productions route hero style frames and product beauty shots to it whenever lighting quality is the primary requirement. GPT-Image-2's edge is everything graphic and environmental: it outperforms other models at text and design rendering and at realistic environment and location generation, and it supports reference image attachments — making it the working choice for location sheets, character sheets, UI-heavy frames, and any image carrying on-screen copy. In one documented localization workflow, GPT-Image-2 produced each character or location reference sheet in about 5 minutes, with 4 reference sheets generated per market adaptation.
One caveat on faces: for photoreal skin texture during character casting, one production specified Recraft over Nano Banana Pro, noting Nano Banana produced more generic faces — so if your image is a close-up portrait, neither model in this comparison is automatically the answer.
The strongest documented results don't choose at all — they chain the two. For intricate product work, build the base image with GPT-Image-2 to establish the aesthetic, then run Nano Banana Pro over it to lock the exact product into the frame. A three-ad jewelry campaign used exactly this two-model pass to hold 100% product consistency on intricate pieces across every shot, at roughly $2,400 total for all three ads.
In practice you shouldn't be hand-routing this per image. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with all the current image and video models available, so both models run in one place: the invideo agent selects the model per task on its own — Nano Banana Pro for lighting-critical frames, GPT-Image-2 for text and design work — without you requesting a swap. When you're unsure which model suits a specific shot, generate the same frame with both in the same chat and compare side by side; with invideo's 65% discount on image generation, running 10 variations to find the right one is cheap enough to make testing the default rather than guessing.
Watch some of these to see what works for you:
Nano Banana is unmatched when it comes to image lighting rendering... while Nano Banana Pro is better at lighting, GPT is much better at text and design rendering, which is way more important for this part of the process. Again, the agent already knew that, so I didn't even have to ask for a model swap.
— invideo's creative team