Google is turning your scrappy product shots into something that looks like it came out of a fancy studio shoot – and it’s doing it inside Pomelli, its AI marketing tool built for small businesses. The new feature is called Photoshoot, and it plugs directly into Google’s Nano Banana image generation tech to spit out studio-quality and lifestyle visuals from the kind of quick photos most small brands take on their phones.

At its core, Pomelli has always been about understanding your brand first and creating content second. When you drop in your website, the tool builds what Google calls your “Business DNA” – a profile that captures your tone of voice, colours, fonts and the kind of imagery you already use, so anything it generates doesn’t feel like a generic AI template. Until now, that mostly played out in social posts, campaign ideas and lightweight visuals; Photoshoot takes the same concept and applies it directly to product photography.

The workflow is deliberately simple: you pick a product photo, choose a template, generate, and then refine. That “pick a product” step can start from almost anything – a flat lay on your kitchen table, a badly lit snap from your desktop – because the promise here is that the AI will do the heavy lifting on lighting, background and polish. Then you choose from curated templates like clean studio shots, lifestyle settings, or let Pomelli suggest options based on your brand. Hit generate, and Photoshoot uses your Business DNA plus Google’s Nano Banana model to reimagine that basic photo into something that could sit on a landing page, in an ad, or on Instagram without screaming “last-minute DIY.” Finally, you get a refinement step where you can tweak details and download assets or save them back into your Business DNA for future campaigns.

Nano Banana itself is doing a lot of the magic in the background. It’s Google’s image generation and editing model, part of the Gemini family, that lets you restyle scenes, swap backgrounds, change lighting, and apply reference styles in a few words or scribbles. The same tech can, for example, take a jewellery shot and move it from a plain white table to a warm wooden tabletop with soft afternoon light, or drop a coffee bag into a café-counter setting that matches your brand palette. Nano Banana also bakes in SynthID watermarks – invisible and visible markers that indicate the visual was AI-generated – which means these new product images are clearly synthetic in a way that still works for ad platforms and brand transparency.

Google is also using the Photoshoot launch to quietly upgrade the broader image experience inside Pomelli. Beyond the product-photo flow, users get more accurate image generation that better follows prompts, editing tools like “change my background to a forest,” and style reference features so you can say, effectively, “make everything look like this previous campaign.” Together, that’s meant to turn Pomelli from a text-and-templates AI assistant into something closer to a mini creative studio for both visuals and copy.

For small and medium-sized businesses, this is hitting a very real pain point: good visuals are expensive, time-consuming, and often the first thing that gets compromised when budgets are tight. Traditionally, you either pay a photographer or agency, learn your way around tools like DSLR cameras and studio lighting, or lean on do-it-all platforms like Canva and hope your content doesn’t look like everyone else’s. Pomelli’s pitch is that you already have the raw ingredients – your website, a few photos, your logo – and AI can do the rest, creating fresh, on-brand assets without requiring you to think like an art director.

The Business DNA model is key here, because it’s how Photoshoot avoids the uncanny, slightly off-brand look that plagues a lot of AI marketing visuals. Pomelli analyses your fonts, colours, imagery and copy to understand patterns instead of just copying specific assets, then uses that model to guide everything from campaign concepts to product shots. In practice, that means the same palette and general vibe you use on your website should carry through to the new Photoshoot-generated imagery, giving your Instagram grid, ad creatives and landing pages a more coherent look.

On the campaign side, Google is also tightening the loop between visuals and messaging. You can upload images directly into your campaign prompt to ground the ideas, or even just paste in a product page URL and ask Pomelli to “create a promo for my new necklaces,” letting the tool pull titles, descriptions and imagery from your site. That’s where Photoshoot becomes more than a one-off editor: the same generated product visuals can fuel campaign concepts, social variations and ad units, all within a single workspace.

This also plants Pomelli and Photoshoot squarely in the middle of a broader trend: AI tools specialized for small business marketing, not just general-purpose image generators. Google already has Gemini and Nano Banana for creativity and editing; Pomelli is where that frontier AI gets wrapped up in workflows that mirror how marketers actually operate – define the brand, set a goal, generate ideas, then produce assets. It’s a direct answer to the reality that most SMBs don’t have the time to learn complex tools or the budget to outsource creative work, but still need to ship a steady stream of polished content to keep up on social and search.

Of course, all of this raises the usual questions about AI-generated marketing: how much synthetic content is too much, and will feeds start to feel even more homogenous as more brands lean on similar tools. Google’s bet is that grounding everything in each business’s DNA will keep outputs from blending together, but it’s fair to expect a learning curve as marketers figure out how to use Photoshoot in a way that amplifies their brand instead of smoothing out its quirks. There’s also the trust dimension – even with watermarks and disclosure, businesses will need to be thoughtful about where they use AI imagery versus real photography, especially for regulated products or sensitive categories.

For now, though, Photoshoot makes Pomelli feel less like an experimental AI toy and more like a practical tool you can slot into an existing workflow. If you’re already running a Shopify store, managing your own social channels, or juggling marketing on top of everything else, the idea of uploading a quick product photo and getting back a full set of polished, on-brand images – for free, in a few clicks – is a compelling proposition. And as Google keeps pushing Nano Banana and Gemini forward, Pomelli looks increasingly like its proving ground for how “AI-native” marketing will actually feel for the small businesses that live or die by their next campaign.