Make festive photo cards in rich colour with Seedream 5.0

What Seedream is for, and where Flare or Nano Banana Pro win

Seedream is ByteDance's family of image models, and the version we run is Seedream 5.0 Pro. It makes a picture at 1K or 2K from a written description, from up to eight photos of your people, or from both. Our catalogue tags it "Rich colour", and that is the fair summary: it is at its best when the picture should feel like a celebration - a birthday lunch in the garden, a holiday table heaped with fruit, a baby's first morning at home.

Where another model here is the better choice, we would rather say so up front. For one face that has to be exactly right, GPT Image 2.5 Flare is our best-likeness model and the one Auto uses. For five people who all need to be recognisable, Nano Banana Pro is tagged for up to five, and it drew all 36 scene pictures in our catalogue. For words drawn inside the picture, like "Happy 70th, Mum", pick GPT Image 2. FLUX.2 Pro is tagged Photo realism, and Nano Banana 2 is tagged Fast. Seedream earns its place when the colour and the mood of the day matter more than any single face.

Name the colours, or you lose the reason to use it

Name the colours and the light outright. Both of our examples did: the garden dinner asked for "rich saturated colours" and a sunlit garden, the nursery for "gentle morning light" and "rich warm colours". Colour is the reason to choose this model, so leaving it out of the prompt wastes the one thing it is here for.

Then place people the way a photographer would. Say who sits where and what they hold: grandparents at the head of the table, children with balloons, Dad with the baby in the crook of his arm. Give the picture one centre of attention. In the nursery picture, everything leads to the sister's kiss, and that is why it works as a card.

Two short lines finish the job. "Realistic photo" keeps the look of a snapshot rather than an illustration, and "no text" keeps letters out of the picture, so the greeting can do the talking. When you add photos of your people, choose ones where the faces are well lit and not tiny, and say in words who each person is.

Blue on white, red on gold: three tables to start from

The colour scheme is the part of a Seedream prompt worth planning, so here are three we would start from. For Grandpa's 80th: the whole family at a long table in a lemon grove, a white tablecloth, bowls of oranges and figs, blue and yellow balloons tied to the chairs, Grandpa laughing at the head of the table in late afternoon sun. Blue and yellow against white gives the model clear colours to work with, and one person at the head gives the picture its centre.

For Rosh Hashanah, with photos of the grandparents: the two of them at their own table with apples, a jar of honey, a round challah and pomegranates in a blue bowl, under warm lamplight, in deep reds and golds. Two people keep the faces reliable, and the table carries the colour. If their faces must be exact, run the same prompt on GPT Image 2.5 Flare.

For New Year: the four of you on a snowy balcony at midnight with sparklers, red and gold fireworks over the city, warm light from the window behind. Four is where faces stay most reliable, and a dark sky full of red and gold is the contrast a colour-first model is here for. End each prompt with "realistic photo, no text".