December 2025.
North Pole.

As the year winds down and the lights go up, we send warm wishes to all—no matter what traditions you celebrate, or wherever you find joy this season. Whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Solstice, or simply time spent with loved ones, may your holidays be filled with peace, warmth, and a touch of magic.

This year’s holiday greeting comes wrapped in a bit of digital wonder. Using Google’s Nano Banana and Photoshop 2026, I transformed a photo of my wife and me—taken during our anniversary trip to New Orleans in October—into a festive winter scene straight from the North Pole. The result is a blend of memory and imagination: Santa and Mrs. Claus outside a glowing workshop beneath the northern lights. It’s a playful reminder that with the right tools, even real-life moments can be reimagined into something magical.

About the photo: For those who want to experiment with Nano Banana, it’s right there in Google’s Gemini interface. Just ask Gemini to use Nano Banana to generate an image, or, in my case, to modify the image to my liking. We started with an image captured on our fall trip to New Orleans. On the night of our 55th anniversary, we went to dinner at a popular seafood restaurant, GW Fins. After dinner, we posed for a cellphone photo in front of the restaurant, taken by my niece, Patricia.

I started by preprocessing the photo to remove some people in the background who were waiting for a seat in the restaurant. Next, I sent it off to Nano Banana through Gemini’s AI interface. Nano Banana generates images with a resolution of only 1024×1024 pixels or about 1K. From earlier experimentation, I expected that, but I didn’t expect a couple of other surprises.

I immediately discovered that Nano Banana changes faces. Given the white beard and Santa hat, it appeared that I had only lost my own smile in the conversion. Lynn, however, had two significant changes I needed to address. First and foremost, that wasn’t Lynn standing next to me—her face and hairstyle had changed significantly. Those issues needed to be addressed in Photoshop 2026. But first, we needed to be relocated to the North Pole.

I asked Gemini to create Santa’s Workshop. I didn’t specify whether it was an exterior or interior scene, but I like the outdoor setting, especially with the Northern Lights and the warm glow from inside the windows.

I used Photoshop’s Remove Background to isolate Mr. and Mrs. Claus, then sent them as a Smart Object layer to Photoshop after loading the workshop image. Using the Transform tool, I sized and rotated the Smart Object to fit it in the lower right corner of the workshop image. I used Photoshop’s new Harmonize tool to match the background’s lighting and tone. Then it was time to work on Lynn’s face to bring her back.

When I showed her how the image changed her hairstyle, she actually liked it. She snapped a photo of the hairstyle on her cellphone to see if she could get that cut in her next appointment. One problem solved, now to deal with her face conversion. I asked Gemini how to replace a face with another and followed the step-by-step instructions provided. Basically, I loaded the original image of our photo in front of the restaurant as a Smart Object and used the Lasso selection tool to select and copy Lynn’s face. I overlaid Mrs. Claus’s face with Lynn’s, set her face to 50% opacity to make the underlying face visible, and adjusted the size of Lynn’s face to correspond with the face underneath. I returned the layer’s opacity to 100% and confirmed the overlay matched. Then I used the Harmonize function in Photoshop to match the color balance, shading, and tone of the underlying image. When I sent it back into Lightroom Classic, I noticed some transition lines beneath her cheek and chin. I used the Remove tool to erase the telltale lines.

Next, I asked Photoshop to generate a sign in front of the window, but despite six attempts, Photoshop’s Firefly failed to get the lettering right, dropping or adding letters, or worse yet, misshaping them. I went back to Nano Banana and asked for a sign with decorations and a candy-striped pole. I accepted the first attempt, but it was on a background. Photoshop’s background removal took care of that, and similarly to how I added people to the image, I sized the sign to fit underneath the window and tilted it. Then I selected the sign’s layer and used Harmonize to match the background’s lighting and tone.

One of the things I noticed in using Nano Banana’s generations is that they appear slightly dark, so I sent the final version off to Luminar Neo for a touch of Accent AI to brighten the scene. The last step was to upscale the original 1K image to 2K resolution. I attempted the procedure using Photoshop’s new Generate Upscale module, and I also sent the 1K image to Luminar Neo for comparison with the two upscale tools. They were nearly identical, and truthfully, I don’t remember which of the two versions I used for the final image. You can view all the iterations of this conversion on my Flickr site in 2K HD here. Ultimately, this project, like our holiday Photoshop project last year, demonstrates how powerful tools like Nano Banana and Photoshop can transform a real-life memory into digital holiday magic.

John Steiner