Full Guide to Seedream 4.0: ByteDance’s HD AI for Posters, Infographics & More

When ByteDance first released Seedream, it was easy to think of it as “the TikTok company’s side project.” But the series has grown quickly, and Seedream 4.0, now available in our Image Generator, shows just how far it’s come. Keep reading to find out more!

What Is Seedream 4.0 (and what came before)?

Seedream didn’t begin life trying to outshine every AI art model at once. Its earliest versions were more like design tools, built to place Chinese text correctly inside images and generate simple, structured layouts. That may sound modest, but it solved a notoriously tough problem in AI: making text inside images readable.

Seedream 3.0 was the turning point. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a specialist tool. It was fast, bilingual, and able to handle a wide range of styles, from photorealistic portraits to stylized posters. For the first time, people outside China started paying attention. It wasn’t perfect (long paragraphs of text were still a bit of a headache), but it was polished and practical enough to become a real alternative to the big names.

Now comes Seedream 4.0, and the difference is clear. ByteDance’s own benchmarks show it outperforming 3.0 across every major measure: how well it follows prompts, how realistic the aesthetics look, and how consistently it edits images without breaking them.

Impressionist oil painting of a busy Paris café terrace. Sign above the door reads ‘CAFÉ DE LUMIÈRE’. Loose brushstrokes, golden sunset tones.

Concert poster. Title: ‘THE SOUND OF FRACTALS’. Background: a shattered glass sphere refracting rainbow light into geometric shards. Subtitle: ‘Live at the Crystal Hall · 05.11.2026’. Bold white lettering bending along the curve of the sphere.

Nighttime street in Seoul during rain. Neon signs reflecting on wet pavement, umbrellas everywhere, one person crossing in a bright red coat. Ultra-realistic cinematic style.

Why Seedream 4.0 Feels Different

Seedream 4.0 on getimg.ai outputs images at high 2K resolution by default, making them sharp enough for professional design work and detailed creative projects. That’s an immediate upgrade if you’ve struggled with fuzzier text or washed-out details in other models.

And while it remains one of the best models available for layouts and text handling, Seedream 4.0 is far from one-dimensional. It handles:

• Photorealistic photography (crisp food shots, cinematic portraits, natural landscapes).
• Illustration and anime styles (from children’s book whimsy to neon-soaked futuristic scenes).
• Painterly art (watercolors, oils, and even abstract compositions).

In short: if you’re making a poster or infographic, it’s outstanding. But if you just want a breathtaking painting or lifelike portrait? It’s equally capable.

Another key feature: when generating new images with it in our Image Generator, you can upload up to 3 Seedream Reference images. That means you can:

• Pull style inspiration directly from an existing picture.
• Apply edits without starting from scratch.
• Mix your own assets with Seedream’s generation power.

This flexibility makes Seedream just as valuable for iterative design as it is for fresh generations.

Editing Without the Friction

Seedream 3.0 introduced editing, but version 4.0 makes it reliable. Instead of redrawing the whole canvas when you want a small change, you can use natural language instructions:

• “Change the title from ‘Summer Festival’ to ‘Autumn Festival’, keep the same font and alignment.”
• “Switch the background to dark blue, but leave the text and logo unchanged.”

Base image.

Change 'COSMOS' into 'SPACE'. Preserve the rest of the text.

The model understands what should change... and what should stay the same. Fonts, layouts, and colors remain consistent, which makes it far more practical for actual workflows than many “generate-and-hope” models (but it's also great for total makeovers!).

Base image.

Change the style into a 3D cartoon.

How to Write Prompts for Seedream 4.0

Prompting Seedream 4.0 is a bit like briefing a junior designer: the clearer you are, the better the result.

• Start with the type of image: “poster design,” “cinematic landscape,” “children’s book illustration.”
• Be specific with details: lighting, perspective, style.
• Keep text requests short: headlines and captions work, full paragraphs don’t.
  Add layout cues if needed: “headline at top, centered subject, symmetrical composition.”

Photorealistic image of a glass observatory perched on the edge of a snowy cliff, aurora borealis glowing in the sky above. Wide-angle perspective, high contrast lighting.

Cartoon-style children’s poster. Title at the top: ‘LEARN YOUR ABCs’. Below: a large red ‘A’ with an apple illustration, a blue ‘B’ with a balloon, and a green ‘C’ with a cat. Bright, playful colors.

Ultra-realistic, well-staged, food magazine-fit photograph of a plate of spaghetti carbonara, golden yolk sauce glistening, sprinkled with parmesan, black pepper visible on top.

As you can see, it thrives on direct instructions.

Should You Try It?

ByteDance's Seedream 4.0 is more than an upgrade. It’s a sign of what image models can be when they move beyond aesthetics and start handling structure, speed, and knowledge.

👉 Try it now in our Image Generator. Experiment with a poster, an infographic, or even a history timeline. You’ll see how far it’s come since Seedream 3.0, and why it deserves a place alongside our other models like GPT Image, FLUX, and Qwen.