ByteDance Introduces Seedream 5.5 for Professional Image Production

What happened

ByteDance Seed introduces Seedream 5.5, an image generation model for professional production workflows. ByteDance says it preserves unchanged image areas at the pixel level across up to 100 editing rounds without color shifts, and generates native RGBA images with transparent backgrounds. The model is gradually rolling out via Jimeng, Doubao, Doubao Work, and Volcengine Ark; a Pro version is planned.

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Reported by 3 sources

The story so far

ByteDance released Seedream 5.5, an image generation and editing model that is rolling out through Jimeng, Doubao, Doubao Work, and Volcengine Ark; developers can try it on Ark as Doubao-Seedream-5.5. ByteDance says the model can preserve unchanged image areas at the pixel level through up to 100 editing rounds and create native RGBA images with transparent backgrounds. A Pro version is planned. In his tests, Baoyu found that eight of 10 rounds of edits to a crowded tourist photo left untouched areas pixel-identical to the prior image, and all 11 edits to a talking cartoon avatar met his pixel-difference criteria. He also reported mixed results for multilingual text and opaque glass in a transparent-background image. ByteDance reports a severe text error rate of 0.4%, down from 2.8% in the previous generation, and says editing realism trails Nano Banana 2.1 by about 6%. For 2K square-image editing, the reported cost is about 0.28 yuan per image, less than half the Seedream 5.0 Pro cost. Under the API pricing model, text tokens are not charged.