Which AI image generation model produces the most realistic lighting?

Nano Banana Pro produces the most realistic lighting of the current AI image models — invideo's production teams describe its lighting rendering as unmatched. But lighting is one dimension of a frame: GPT-Image-2 wins on text, design, and realistic environments, and Recraft holds better skin texture, so production stills often combine models.

Use Nano Banana Pro whenever lighting realism is the primary requirement of the frame — hero style frames, product beauty shots, anything where light falloff, reflections, and shadow behavior sell the image. invideo is an agentic video creation platform with all of the current image models available, and the invideo agent routes each generation to the right one automatically — in one documented production it swapped to GPT-Image-2 for a text-heavy frame without being asked, because lighting wasn't the priority for that step.

Match the model to what each frame carries. GPT-Image-2 outperforms other models for realistic environment and location generation and accepts reference image attachments, which makes it the pick for location sheets and any frame with on-image text or design elements. Recraft holds better skin texture than Nano Banana Pro, so route character close-ups there when skin under light is the tell. For product frames that need both a strong aesthetic and exact product fidelity, run a two-model pass: build the base image with GPT-Image-2 to set the aesthetic, then run Nano Banana over it to lock the exact product into that lighting — the workflow one jewelry production used to hold intricate detail across shots.

Direct the light itself in physical language, whatever model renders it. Prompts like "single hard warm key light, side-raked, skin rim-lit, environment falling into shadow" produce editorial-grade separation; "sunny day, slightly backlit, not harsh sunlight" reads better than adjectives like "cinematic." And when a shot's lighting still looks artificial, stop iterating on one model: render the identical prompt across every available model side by side in the same invideo agent chat and pick the winner — one production compared six models on a single shot this way. With invideo's 65% discount on image generation, running ten lighting variations to find the right one is cheap; lock the lighting at the still stage before any video credits are spent.

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