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Nova
Prompt Lab / Case Study 01 Issue 01

Composites — the bike that stays the bike

Compositing a photoreal subject into an illustrated environment.

The brief was small in words and large in consequence:put my actual bicycle on this seaside backdrop. The question of which model could do that — without re-stylising the bike or breaking the plate — turned out to be the entire job.

Step 01 — the plate

Build a backdrop that leaves room.

Before the subject, the stage. Flux 1.1 Pro is the right tool for clean horizon work — the surf gradient and the soft cloud bank survive at any aspect, and the lower-left third is kept deliberately empty as a placement target.

A wide empty seaside backdrop, midday sun, soft surf, low horizon, photorealistic. Composition leaves the lower-left third deliberately uncluttered as a placement target. Shot on a 35mm full-frame, neutral colour grade, no people.

Flux 1.1 Pro · 16:9 · Generated plate

Empty seaside backdrop, midday light. The bare plate — sand, surf and a low horizon held in deliberate negative space, intended as a stage for later compositing.

Flux 1.1 Pro · 16:9 · Generated plate

Seaside, plain

Step 02 — the wrong path

Generated bicycles are not your bicycle.

Flux 1.1 Pro will happily render a vintage step-through and a modern road bike. Convincing? Yes. The actual bike from the reference? No — not the frame, not the decals, not the bar tape, not the wear. Useful as stock-style comps; insufficient when the bike is the brief.

Two false starts

  • A —Vintage cream step-through, generated wholesale.
  • B —Modern carbon road bike, flatter, more product-shot.
Same plate, recomposed with a vintage step-through bicycle in the foreground. First composite pass — the bike is generated wholesale, not lifted from a reference.

Flux 1.1 Pro · 16:9 · Generated composite

Seaside with vintage bicycle

Modern road bike composite — flatter look, more product-shot than editorial. Useful as a foil to the vintage frame.

Flux 1.1 Pro · 16:9 · Generated composite

Seaside with road bike

Both: Flux 1.1 Pro · 16:9 · generated likenesses

Step 03 — the right model

Nano Banana Pro Edit, because it leaves the subject alone.

Flux Kontext re-stylises subjects under stress. Seedream-4 wants to paint, not preserve. Nano Banana Pro Edit is the only one in this set that treats the reference image as a lock-mask — geometry held, decals held, light direction re-matched to the plate. The output is the actual bike, on the actual sand.

Place the reference bicycle into the seaside backdrop. Preserve the bike exactly — frame, decals, bar tape, wear. Match light direction and shadow length to the plate. Do not invent or stylise.

Flux Kontext

Re-stylises.

Seedream-4

Paints.

Nano Banana

Preserves.

Final composite — the reference bicycle is preserved verbatim, dropped into the seaside plate by Nano Banana Pro Edit. The point of the series.

Nano Banana Pro Edit · 1:1 · Reference-preserving edit

Seaside with the actual bike (reference preserved)

Takeaways

01

Pick the model after you know what must be preserved.

Photoreal generation and reference-preserving editing are different jobs. Conflating them costs passes.

02

Light direction is on you to specify.

Edit-class models will respect the subject; they won't always re-light it without instruction. Name the source and angle in the prompt.

03

Keep the failed passes.

Two generated bikes are not waste — they're the proof of why the right model mattered. Show the work.

See the rest of the galleryModel notes — when to reach for what
Prompt Lab — Nova