Black Forest Labs launches Flux 3 Image with multi-step editing
The new model changes one part of a picture at a time and leaves the rest alone, with layouts set by bounding boxes and output up to 4K.
Black Forest Labs has released Flux 3 Image, the image side of its Flux 3 model family. It handles text-to-image, image-to-image, text rendering and photorealism, and the company's main claim is about editing: you can make several changes to a picture without anything else in it moving.
Editing one part at a time
The point is consistency: changing a jacket color should not also bring a new face, a new background or different light. Black Forest Labs' product page describes making multiple edits at once without changing anything else, and gives recoloring, swapping and replacing single items as examples. Each change can be aimed at one area of the image while the rest is kept as it was.
For anyone producing product shots, ad variations or a series of images that must stay consistent, this is the part to test first. If the claim holds up in your own tests, a change that leaves the rest of the frame alone means fewer rounds of regenerating and comparing.
Laying out a scene with boxes
Instead of describing where things go in words and hoping, you can place elements with bounding boxes. The product page says positions are set on a grid from 0 to 1000 that works the same at any aspect ratio, and edits can be pointed at a specific box.
You can also give the model up to ten reference images. Each one gets its own name in the prompt, such as ref_image_0 and ref_image_1, so you can say which reference supplies the product, which the person and which the style. Output goes up to 4K, and Black Forest Labs shows an example of 5456 by 3072 pixels straight from the model. Its examples also include legible text on signs, logos and printed material.
Price and licensing
API access is 50 percent off through October 8. The company sells its models by the image through API credits, with no subscription and no free tier, so the free demo on its site is the way to try Flux 3 Image before paying.
Companies can license commercial weights to run and fine-tune the model on their own hardware, which matters for teams that cannot send images to an outside API. An open-weight version is expected in the coming weeks.
Ideogram is moving the same way
Shortly before this launch, Ideogram announced its own editing-focused model, version 4.5, which is also set to ship as open weights soon. If you edit images more than you generate them from scratch, both are worth comparing once they are out.