n32 | Restaurant Photography with Nanobanana Pro

This might just be the easiest way to get a client for your AI creative agency and start earning in the new year because this market is massive. [music]

In the US alone, the restaurant industry is projected to reach $1.5 trillion in sales in 2025. And there is one thing that every restaurant needs, great photos of their food. But most

restaurants are small. They don't really have the time nor the investment range for professional food photography.

[music] Because of this, their Instagram and Google Maps listings usually look like this, this, and [music] this. Even

when the food is genuinely great, the photos fail to show how good it really is. And so, this is where you can step

is. And so, this is where you can step in. Because with AI, you can fix this

in. Because with AI, you can fix this [music] problem for them in minutes by using free tools without a studio or a camera, where you turn unappetizing food shots into visuals that sell. And you

build trust with your clients by showing these restaurants how incredible their food can look. Then you can offer this [music] as an AIdriven brand refresh and turn them into a long-term client. So,

in this video, I'll show you exactly how to find clients for this service, how to package it properly and professionally, [music] and when you're ready to deliver and scale, I'll also show how to automate the whole thing using creative

AI and automation tools. So, if you're looking for a simple AI service that you can start selling right away without getting too technical, then this video is for you. Let's get started.

Hey, if you're new here, my name is Jay.

I spent a decade in creative and marketing work and half a decade leading data teams. I'm now operating our AI creative agency and robo nuggets our education arm where we have several hundred members all AI practitioners

across the globe and here our mission is to make creating with AI easy to learn for anyone with AI training and certification that most people join for but most members stay because of the strong community we have built. Okay

friends, so what we're going to cover in this lesson is two parts. First, I'll

show you the easiest and free way to do this using Nano Banana Pro and Gemini Tree. But I'll also show you how you can

Tree. But I'll also show you how you can do things faster if you learn about automation using a tool like N8N. And if

you stick till the end, I'll also show a few bonuses for you to learn, which is how you can potentially expand your service from beyond just food photos.

And also another nugget which we'll save near the end of the lesson. But firstly,

I'll show you how easy it is to do this.

Because if you go to Google and you just type something like restaurants in my area or a specific area like in this case in Crows Nest, Sydney, and you can see just by viewing the maps here, there's already a lot of potential leads that you can offer this to. But for you

to narrow it down, there's a few things you can keep in mind to find your ideal client. This local restaurant, for

client. This local restaurant, for example, what you want to do is to view their menu. Because for customers trying

their menu. Because for customers trying to find a place to eat, usually what's the customer journey is the fact that they open Google Maps, look at the options around them, and browse their menu to see if the food is appetizing or not. And for this restaurant,

not. And for this restaurant, unfortunately, I don't think they have invested much into their menu listings here. So, this seafood pa mixa, I've

here. So, this seafood pa mixa, I've actually tried this, and this is really good. But if you just view their photo

good. But if you just view their photo here, I don't think it does justice to how good this dish actually was. And

this obviously isn't really the restaurant's fault because usually they don't have the time nor the required investment range in order to hire a food photography studio to upgrade this for them. But with AI, it's actually easy to

them. But with AI, it's actually easy to upgrade these food photos. Now, it's

just that not a lot of people know about it yet. And to show how common the

it yet. And to show how common the problem this is for restaurants, this is another example where if you go to their menu, it's the same thing where the food shots here can definitely be optimized.

And the other thing is if you go to their Instagram, it's the same story where their food may taste great, but these photos don't really do it much justice. And so what we'll do now is to

justice. And so what we'll do now is to message them on Instagram showing an example of how we can turn their current food photos into more appetizing shots that will surely bring in more customers for them. And the way you do this is

for them. And the way you do this is actually very simple. Right now you can just browse their menu for a photo that you want to upgrade. Let's say this one.

And once you have this photo, you can just go to Google Gemini here in this URL. You can copy that image by doing a

URL. You can copy that image by doing a right click, paste it here. And we can just send this prompt where we're asking Gemini to turn this photo into a premium professionally styled food shot of the same dish. I have a couple more details

same dish. I have a couple more details around the prompt here which you can copy or adjust which this prompt I also just uploaded in the link below so that you can just copy it and what you want to do is set it to thinking mode so that you can use Nano Banana Pro and under

the options here you want to select create images and just go ahead and send. Now I'm at the free version of

send. Now I'm at the free version of Gemini here so you can do this even if you don't have the Gemini plus plan and also remember that Google Gemini has a mobile app and so this is perfect if you're comfortable to pitch on the spot the next time you dine out. What you can

literally do is take a photo of their food with your mobile phone. use this

prompt to turn it into a shot like this, which now it just finished, and then show and share it with the owner for free to see if it's something that they'd be interested in to upgrade their whole menu. So, after a few seconds,

whole menu. So, after a few seconds, Nano Banana Pro, which is the model we used in Gemini, was now able to turn this photo into a much more professional shot. And you can see it retains all of

shot. And you can see it retains all of the ingredients, and overall, it just makes it look better and more appetizing for the consumer. Do note that in Gemini, there is a small watermark here, but in part two, I'll show how to get

these images without the watermark whenever you generate them. And just to show you another example, I also sent the same prompt for this paella image.

And Nano Banana Pro was able to give us this more professionally styled food shop. And so now what you want to do is

shop. And so now what you want to do is to go to their Instagram and send them a message. And we can just expand this so

message. And we can just expand this so that you can see. And you can just take a screenshot of that image you generated without including the watermark if you like. And you also want to save the

like. And you also want to save the original reference image. Attach both of those to your message and send them a message like this. which if you break down this message, you essentially have this hook at the top, which is important because if you look at your DMs on

Instagram, it shows you the preview of your very first line. So the goal of that first line is for the receiver to open your message. So you can use a simple hook like misleading food shots in your Google listing, but in the very first sentence, we clarify that and say

that we saw their menu on Google Maps and thought they were misleading. You

introduce yourself by saying you're a local creative studio owner in the area and say that you know that their food looks better than what they have in the photos online. You then give them some

photos online. You then give them some free value by showing a before example of how they can be enhanced and that they can use it in their socials if they'd like. And then the last sentence

they'd like. And then the last sentence here gives them an idea of what you're offering by saying that you're currently working with a small group of local business owners to give them a social media brand refresh. And if they want to be part of that small group, then they

can respond to your message here. So

that's just a simple example where you have a hook, you have an offer, and you also introduce a bit of scarcity by sharing the fact that you are working with only a small group of local business owners. And that's part one, a

business owners. And that's part one, a very simple and easy way for you to start offering services using your knowledge of AI. But now the question becomes once you're ready to deliver that work or if you want to do things

faster and at scale, how can you now automate that whole process? And so this is one example of how we did exactly that where you can see we automated the sourcing of the leads that will offer the service to automated the download of

our reference images which we transformed into two images this time so that we have more options. And if we look at these images, you'll also notice that they don't have the Gemini watermark, which is perfect for us when

we're dealing with production work. So

you can imagine if you're doing a whole makeover of their menu and let's say you have 30 items, you can just load all of them here, run your automation, and you'll instantly get these images back, which you can package and provide to your client. And apart from that, you

your client. And apart from that, you can also use this automation for scaling your Instagram DM outreach. Because

apart from creating the images, we can also use this system in order to get their Instagram URLs so that we can do that same process of reaching out to them via socials. In that automation, it's all powered by this system which we

built in N8N, which for this next part, I'll show how it works so that you can decide if you want to learn it as well.

But in case you're new, N8N is a no code automation builder similar to Zapier orate.com. But what's great about N8N is

orate.com. But what's great about N8N is if you're watching this and you're part of the community, you can just get this template from our resources page here.

And when you download that and import that file into N8N, it will load that whole system for you from scratch. And

the way this automation works is quite simple because we practically just have two parts here where we first get the restaurants where we can offer the service to and then we create the images for them. This purple section is more of

for them. This purple section is more of just a bonus if in case you want to expand beyond images and create videos for your client as well. And for us to start, if you want to get multiple restaurants that we can offer this service to, we just click execute

workflow here in the very first row.

That will open up a form where we can just declare how many listings or restaurants we want. In this case, we'll do 10. Let's say we want to get two

do 10. Let's say we want to get two images per listing. And the location we want to search in is Sydney, Australia.

So once we click submit, what it's now going to do is to run that automation for us that will scrape for restaurants within Google Maps in that location that we asked for. And when that has finished processing, it now stores all of those

listings into this tool called Air Table, which was the tool we were viewing earlier that functions quite similar to Google Sheets, except that you can load media, photos, and videos into the individual cells so that you can preview them. So, it's much easier

to work with it. And they also have a really generous feed tier. So, you can use this tool as you're getting started.

But you can see when our get restaurants automation ran in Air Table, it gave us the name of the restaurant, some information about that business such as their address, their website, and importantly, their Instagram handle. And

we also got photos of some of their dishes straight from Google Maps, which we are about to turn into AI enhanced photos all at the same time. And by the way, this Air Table template, if you're watching this and you're part of the

community, remember that you can just access it in this link so that you can duplicate it and it's much easier for you. But just to give you an overview,

you. But just to give you an overview, the way we got those listings is through this tool called Appify, which if you're completely new, Appify is basically a collection of scrapers where you can see here there's options on Tik Tok, there's options on Instagram. The specific one

we use for this automation is this Google maps scraper where you can basically provide inputs to it like what we did here in the form around how many listings we want to source and the location from which we will source that.

And whenever this node runs in N8N that will return all the listings for us to use in our automation. And so if we open this node to inspect it if you're curious in N8N you basically have the inputs to this node here at the left.

You have the configuration here in the middle and you have the output of this node here at the right. If you're

interested about how we configure this we have several other tutorials in our platform of how we set it up. So here

you can see it returned to us those 10 restaurants along with all of the information and images that we loaded into air tableable. But before we loaded it into air tableable. You notice we have an analyze image node here which if we open that basically the only

instructions that we're asking this node to do is to identify if the image that we got is an image of a single dish of food because remember in Google maps sometimes the images that you can get there are images of the restaurant themselves which is not really what

we're after. And so this node just

we're after. And so this node just automatically skips these images so that we can focus on images of actual food dishes. And when that's done and they're

dishes. And when that's done and they're logged in Air Table, we have a clean list of images that we can now transform. And so to do that, what you

transform. And so to do that, what you can do is run this second automation where if we execute that stream, it's going to get all of those rows that we want to create for and create images for them by batch also using Nano Banana

Pro. And when that is done, we now have

Pro. And when that is done, we now have our images loaded back into Air Table, which we can now view here. So these

turned out pretty good. And just to show a few examples, we turned this image into this more professional shot. We

turned this to this. And so just overall the quality and the detail of this image is just much better than what we started with. And again, if you want to learn

with. And again, if you want to learn how to set up these nodes from scratch, we have several deep dives in the past of how we set this up. But just to show you the prompts we used, if we open this, the prompt we're using for the very first image is basically the same

as what we manually did earlier, which is this piece of text that you can see in this area. Now for the second image, since we want slightly different options, but of the same dish, what we're actually doing is feeding the very

first image into this node. And if we open this, you can see the prompt that we are giving it is also quite simple.

We're basically instructing Nano Banana Pro to give a different camera angle shot of the reference image. And just to guide it further, we're asking it to choose between a direct overhead shot, a close-up detail shot, or a low angle

shot, which you can see in these images.

And so now with these images, you're actually done already for this specific service. But when you start working with

service. But when you start working with clients, usually it's much easier to scale your services from the same client because you've already built a relationship with them instead of having to onboard several new clients each time. And so what you can do as an

time. And so what you can do as an extended service is to actually turn these images into videos which to illustrate that we also have this automation where if we execute this workflow is going to create those videos

for us on autopilot as well. And when

those videos have finished processing that would now give you the videos that we showed earlier in the intro. And

basically to get those videos what we're doing is to set the first image as a starting frame and the second image as the ending frame using the cling 2.5 video model. This is outside the scope

video model. This is outside the scope of this specific tutorial though. So let

me know if you want me to do a breakdown of that as well. So that's pretty much the whole workflow in full. But just as a few final bonus nuggets, one of the questions that for sure you will face is how much you will want to price this service. And one quick technique that

service. And one quick technique that you can do is that in Google, you can actually just ask it how much is a food photography package in your location and it will do some research for you on how much the rates are. And so in the US,

these services cost somewhere along $750 to $2,000 for only 5 to 15 images, which obviously depending on the business that you're pitching to, you will likely need to adjust this depending on their purchasing power. Because remember,

purchasing power. Because remember, since you're doing this via AI, if you have the skill and you can create these images in just one shot, your cost to produce these images are practically only 14 if you're doing it via the

automation that we showed earlier. Or

you can even do it for free if you're doing it manually through the earlier manual method that we showed. So, even

if you price each image as only $10, you still net a profit of around 98% which is just insane margins all because you know how to use these AI tools. And the

reason why this is such a good opportunity and skill to learn is because this doesn't stop at just creating for restaurants. Once you learn this skill, you can apply the same technique into any business so that you can upgrade their branding and their

social media presence as well. And the

last point that I wanted to mention is that as you go through this creative process and as you set up your own AI creative agency or studio, unfortunately at this point since AI is early, you will still encounter a bit of push back

around the use of AI for enhancing images. But one mental model that you

images. But one mental model that you can use to support your work is that when you're transforming an actual image of an actual dish, if you prompt it so that you can request an accurate representation of that food, but just

enhanced, you actually start to realize that sometimes doing it this way is more faithful to what customers will expect versus previous methods where even if they're not done with AI, how the final product is represented doesn't really

provide an accurate representation of what the customer will receive. And so

at the end of the day, AI is just a tool and it entirely depends on the decisions of the agency and the business of how to represent the product, whether it's done in a studio or whether it's done with AI. And you will likely encounter these

AI. And you will likely encounter these questions too. So I wanted to give you a

questions too. So I wanted to give you a sense of a framework of how you can answer them. That's it for this one.

answer them. That's it for this one.

I'll see you guys next time. [music]

Thank you.