Prompting Reflections: Mirrors, Water and Glass - Nano Banana 2

A reflection is a rule, not a texture. The mirrored copy has to match the original in pose, clothing, count and position, flipped across the plane of the surface, seen from where the camera is rather than from where the subject is. That is a lot of consistency to hold, and image models hold it loosely. The common failures are recognisable: a mirror image facing the wrong way, a reflection that shows the subject’s front when it should show her back, extra objects that exist only in the glass, a puddle reflecting a building that is not in the frame.

The other frequent failure is intensity. Real reflective surfaces almost never return a perfect copy. Water breaks the image into bands, glass adds its own colour and the room behind it, wet asphalt smears everything vertically. Models tend to render either a flawless second photograph or a vague bright smudge, with very little in between.

It also helps to say what is being reflected, explicitly, even when it is obvious from the rest of the prompt. Wet street reflecting the red and green of the traffic light above it. Window reflecting the street behind the camera. Naming the source turns the reflection from an unconstrained invention into a described object.