Seedream in Batch Banana: best uses and how to prompt it

Wildlife photograph of pink-and-grey galahs bursting off a dead white gum tree, lit by low sun against a black storm sky

Best for

Seedream is ByteDance's image family. Use Seedream 4.5 for photographs, with realistic people, film looks, light and weather. Use Seedream 5 Pro for layouts, where you can place each thing with coordinates.

Portrait of an older chocolate maker seated by a copper melanger, sacks of cocoa pods behind her and a tray of wrapped bars on her lap

Pixel-art poster with LANTERN KEEP in gold letters across the top, an armored knight raising a glowing lantern before a ruined castle at dusk, and Out now on a violet ribbon at the bottom

For posters where every word matters, Ideogram is the safer pick. For vector files, use Arrow. Which model for what shows all five families on the same prompts.

Which version

Version	Use it when
Seedream 4.5	You want a photograph: portraits, film stills, products in real light.
Seedream 5 Lite	You're drafting, or copying an edit from one image to another.
Seedream 5 Pro	You need things in exact places, or a careful edit of one region.

Start on 4.5, at 10 credits an image. The same prompt on each version:

Portrait of a grey-haired chocolate maker in a stained apron in her workshop, a tray of blue-wrapped bars on her knee and a copper melanger beside her

Write the prompt

Write sentences, not tags. ByteDance's guide asks for the subject, what it's doing and where, then style, color, light and composition. Its example: "A girl in a lavish dress walking under a parasol along a tree-lined path, in the style of a Monet oil painting", not "Girl, umbrella, tree-lined street, oil painting texture." Tags still give you a picture, but sentences let you control the parts that tags leave open.

Be plain, not ornate. ByteDance says concise, precise prompts beat stacked fancy words. A pile of "breathtaking, ultra-detailed, epic" gave us a storm we never asked for and a motel named "Midnight Dunes". A plain description gave a quiet dusk with the first stars out, though it doubled the word on a second sign.

Neon motel sign reading Midnight Dunes beside a desert highway under a dramatic storm sky and a blazing sunset

A glowing orange MOTEL sign beside an empty desert highway at dusk, the first stars out over a pink horizon

Say what the image is for. "Design a logo for a gaming company" tells Seedream more than "an abstract image of a dog". ByteDance asks for the purpose and type up front.

Put text in double quotes. ByteDance's example: 'Generate a poster with the title "Seedream 4.5"', not 'Generate a poster titled Seedream 4.5'.

Name the camera or the film. A published Seedream 5 guide recommends naming film stocks, lenses and lighting setups. The galahs at the top of this page came from "600 mm lens, wingtips blurred."

ByteDance recommends no more than 600 words, since a long prompt scatters the details. Most good prompts are far shorter.

Place things with coordinates

On Seedream 5 Pro you can put an element in an exact box. Write <bbox>x1 y1 x2 y2</bbox> after it, where the numbers run from 0 at the top left to 999 at the bottom right. <point>x y</point> marks a single spot.

The title "LANTERN KEEP" in chunky stepped pixel letters, lantern gold, in <bbox>80 40 920 200</bbox>.

ByteDance documents coordinates for edits. In our test they also worked from text alone. Without them, the same poster stacked the title in a corner, moved "Out now" up under it and pushed the knight to the side.

Pixel-art poster with LANTERN KEEP stacked in the top left, Out now just below it, and the knight in the lower left beside a castle

Edit and combine images

Name the target and say what stays. "Dress the tallest panda in pink Peking Opera costume and headgear, keeping its pose unchanged", not "Put that one in pink clothes." ByteDance warns against pronouns like "that one".

Say what to take from each reference. Number them: "Dress the character in Image 1 with the outfit from Image 2."

Copy an edit from one image to another. Give two images, before and after, and a third to change the same way. This is how the green Halvard wrapper in the row above was made, on Seedream 5 Lite, from a ferry photo before and after its recolour:

Image 1 changed to Image 2 by recolouring the wrapper. Apply the same change to the wrapper in Image 3. Keep everything else in Image 3 unchanged.

On 5 Pro, give exact colors as hex codes. ByteDance's example changes pumpkins to "dark green (#3E4A2E) and turmeric yellow (#DB973E)".

Mark the spot. If a region is hard to describe, draw on the image before you attach it, a red box or a scribble, and refer to the mark: "Insert a TV where the red area is marked."

Settings

Resolution is Seedream's only setting besides the aspect ratio. On 4.5, 4K costs the same 10 credits as 2K, and on 5 Lite, 3K costs the same as 2K, so pick the larger one. On 5 Pro, 1K costs 11 credits and 2K costs 22, and an image takes about 90 seconds, so draft at 1K.

Model	Credits per image	Other settings
Seedream 5 Pro	11	Resolution: 2K 22
Seedream 5 Lite	10	Same price
Seedream 4.5	10	Same price

Limits

Seedream 4.5 and 5 Lite take up to 14 reference images, Seedream 5 Pro up to 10.
No Seedream version makes 5:4 or 4:5 images.
Seedream 5 Pro tops out at 2K.
ByteDance calls Seedream 5 Lite a relatively small model with room to improve in structure and realism. Use 4.5 for faces and photographs.

Sources

ByteDance's own guides: Seedream 4.0 to 4.5 prompt guide, Seedream 5 Pro editing with coordinates, and the Seedream 5 Lite and 5 Pro launch posts.

Images made in Batch Banana on October 2, 2026. Select Prompt on an image to read the prompt and model that made it. Where a run made more than one image, we show the one we liked best.