Seedream 4.5

Seedream 4.5 is ByteDance Seed's December 2025 text-to-image and image-editing model, a unified architecture that generates and edits in one system. It renders at 1K, 2K, and 4K resolutions, returns up to 10 images per request, and accepts up to 14 reference images for multi-image composition — more than any flagship competitor — with strong character continuity, lighting and tone preservation, inpainting/outpainting, and notably clean small-text rendering for posters and branding. It ranks on the crowdsourced Arena text-to-image leaderboard.

The honest picture: it's a closed, API-only model priced per image (~$0.04), so there's no local deployment and costs scale with iteration volume. ByteDance's developer ecosystem (BytePlus/Volcengine) is less frictionless than Western alternatives for many teams. As with all image models, photorealistic human output and exact typography still need review before professional use.