Best AI Models for Text in Images (2026)

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Quick answer: for posters, menus and any image where every word has to be right, start with GPT Image 2.5 Flare or FLUX.3 Image. In our first round GPT Image 2.5 Flare was the only model that reproduced all 283 requested characters across two prompts without adding or changing anything. Three newer models matched it. FLUX.3 Image did it at its Fuser defaults, where Expand Prompt starts off. Ideogram 4.5 and Qwen Image 3 did it once we switched their Expand Prompt setting off; with it on, the default in Fuser, each slipped: Qwen Image 3 added a badge to the poster, and Ideogram 4.5 changed a hyphen, the letter case and the spacing of the prices. Seedream 5.0 Lite also spelled everything correctly, but it put an unrequested "BIG]" in front of one headline. [Nano Banana 2, Recraft V4.1 Pro and Qwen Image 2 each got one or two characters wrong, all in the smallest line. FLUX.2 Pro spelled everything correctly but printed one menu item twice. Every model spelled the headlines correctly. Small print is where the differences show.

The test: two typography prompts, nine models

Short headlines no longer separate these models, so we wrote two prompts that put more pressure on small text. The first is a jazz-night poster with a two-word headline, a subtitle and three lines of small print, including a name that is easy to misspell. The second is a café menu with eight items, eight prices and an address line: 172 characters to get right, a lot of them digits.

Every model got the same text, verbatim, with each required string in quotation marks. Poster prompt:

A vertical poster for a jazz night. At the top, a large bold headline that reads "NIGHT BLOOMS". Under it, a smaller line: "Live at the Harbor Room". In the middle, a flat illustration of a brass trumpet surrounded by white moonflowers on a deep teal background. At the bottom, three lines of small text: "Friday, October 17", "Doors 8 PM - Tickets $25", "With the Mara Quintet and special guest Theo Lindqvist". Clean modern sans-serif typography in cream.

Menu prompt:

A printed café menu card in flat graphic design: cream paper, dark brown ink, a small coffee cup icon. Title at the top: "CORNER STORE COFFEE". Below it, a price list with exactly these eight items and prices, one per line: "Espresso 3.20", "Cortado 3.80", "Flat White 4.10", "Oat Latte 4.60", "Cardamom Bun 3.90", "Rye Sourdough Toast 5.40", "Pistachio Croissant 4.75", "Iced Hojicha 4.95". At the bottom, in small text: "Open daily 7:30 to 16:00, 14 Wexford Lane".

Each model ran once at a 3:4 portrait size with default settings. There were no retries and no cherry-picking. The models were GPT Image 2.5 Flare at high quality, Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) at 1K, Recraft V4.1 Pro, Qwen Image 2 on the standard tier, Seedream 5.0 Lite and FLUX.2 Pro. We then read every output at full resolution and counted the characters that matched the request exactly, with spaces excluded: 111 on the poster, 172 on the menu.

On 2 October 2026 we gave the same two prompts to two newer models in Fuser, Ideogram 4.5 and Qwen Image 3, at 3:4. Ideogram 4.5 ran at Medium quality, its default in Fuser, which returns 864 × 1152. Qwen Image 3 ran at 1K, its default, which returns 768 × 1024. Both nodes have an Expand Prompt switch that is on by default, so each prompt ran once with it on and once with it off: eight runs, no retries, counted the same way.

The same day we gave both prompts to FLUX.3 Image, Black Forest Labs' newest image model in Fuser, at 3:4 and its default 1K tier, which returns 880 × 1184. Its Expand Prompt switch is off by default, so it ran once per prompt at its defaults, with no retries, counted the same way.

Results, character by character

• GPT Image 2.5 Flare: 111/111 and 172/172. Both layouts followed the brief line for line, with nothing added. The menu had a framed border, a divider rule and prices set in a clean right-aligned column. It was the only model whose poster and menu both needed no edits.

• FLUX.3 Image: 111/111 and 172/172, nothing added. The poster kept the hyphen and the sentence case of the small print exactly as typed and spelled "Lindqvist" correctly; it set the headline over two lines and drew star-shaped lilies rather than the moonflowers we asked for. The menu came back as a flat card with a double-ruled frame, exactly eight items, prices in a clean column and the footer comma intact. In our FLUX.3 Image vs GPT Image test it also reproduced a 300-character back label exactly.

• Seedream 5.0 Lite: 111/111 and 172/172. It spelled every requested string correctly, and its menu was as clean as GPT Image's. But the poster headline came out as "[BIG] NIGHT BLOOMS". The model seems to have taken "large bold headline" as text to print. It also returned the largest files in the test, 2304 × 3072, which helps when the small print needs to hold up in a large format.

• Qwen Image 3: 111/111 and 172/172, plus an added badge. At its defaults it spelled every requested string correctly, and the menu came back flat, with dotted leaders and nothing extra. The poster gained a round "HARBOR JAZZ CLUB" badge that we never asked for. With Expand Prompt off, the same prompts gave 111/111 and 172/172 with nothing added. In a separate run at 2K with Expand Prompt on, the poster scored 110/111, with the hyphen set as a longer dash, and the badge came back.

• Nano Banana 2: 111/111 and 171/172. Nothing was misspelled. It did merge two of the poster's three small lines into one row. On the menu it ignored "flat graphic design" and drew a photographed card on a wooden table, stamped "CSC" on the coffee cup and broke the address line in two, which dropped the comma.

• Ideogram 4.5: 110/111 and 172/172 at its defaults. At Medium with Expand Prompt on, it set the poster's hyphen as a long dash and printed all three small-print lines in capitals, though we typed them in sentence case. Every menu price had a visible gap after the decimal point ("3. 20"), which our space-free count scores as correct but nobody would print. With Expand Prompt off, it scored 111/111 and 172/172, with the case, the hyphen and the prices exactly as typed. At High quality with Expand Prompt on, it scored 110/111, again with a dash, and a clean 172/172.

• Recraft V4.1 Pro: 110/111 and 171/172. It had the most designed type of the set: tracked caps and consistent weights. It set the poster's hyphen as a long dash and split the menu's footer into two corners, again losing the comma. Its 1792 × 2432 output kept even the footer crisp.

• Qwen Image 2: 110/111 and 171/172. The layout was clear and the menu type was large and readable. It printed the closing time as "16:90" and set the poster's hyphen as a dash. That is a factual error that a quick look would not catch.

• FLUX.2 [pro]: 111/111 and 172/172, plus a repeated line. Every requested string appears, but "Flat White 4.10" is printed twice, so the menu has nine items. The poster lost the space in "8 PM" and broke the last line with mixed weights. It also rendered the menu as a mockup of a card on a surface.

Treat this as two prompts, not a benchmark. The pattern was consistent, though. All nine models spelled the headlines correctly, and every wrong or dropped character came in the smallest line of text. The additions, Seedream's "[BIG]", Qwen Image 3's badge and FLUX.2's repeated menu item, are a separate failure: text that was never requested.

For Ideogram 4.5 and Qwen Image 3, the Expand Prompt switch made the difference. Ideogram's API reference says its Magic Prompt modes "rewrite and expand the prompt before generation", while off "keeps your wording and only converts it into a structured prompt" (Ideogram API reference). In our runs, every dash, case change, spacing gap and addition from these two models came with expansion on.

How to prompt for legible text

These tips come from the vendors' own documentation, and each one held up in our runs:

• Put the exact words in quotation marks. Black Forest Labs' FLUX.2 prompting guide recommends quotes for exact text, for example The text 'OPEN' appears in red neon letters above the door. We quoted every string, and no model misspelled a quoted word.

• Say where each line goes and how big it is. The same guide recommends stating placement relative to other elements and size with phrases like "large headline text" or "small body copy". Keep those phrases outside the quotes, and still check the result: our poster prompt did that, and Seedream 5.0 Lite printed "[BIG]" in front of the headline anyway.

• Name the type style and colors. Describe the style you want ("elegant serif", "bold industrial lettering"). For brand colors, BFL documents hex codes tied to a specific element, such as 'ACME' in color #FF5733. In Fuser, the Recraft V4 node also takes a list of preferred hex colors as a palette.

• Raise quality for small print. OpenAI's image generation guide suggests low quality for drafts and comparing higher settings for final assets. It also states that the model "can still struggle with precise text placement and clarity". The Fuser GPT Image node offers quality levels up to max.

• Turn off prompt expansion when you have written every word. Fuser's Ideogram 4.5 and Qwen Image 3 nodes both have an Expand Prompt toggle that is on by default. In our runs, switching it off was what took both models from a near miss to an exact copy with nothing added. FLUX.3 Image's toggle starts off.

• Match the model to the amount of text. Recraft describes V4 as handling "short and mid-length phrases" with high fidelity. Alibaba says Qwen-Image-2.0 accepts instructions up to 1,000 tokens for posters, slides and infographics, and that Qwen-Image-3.0 supports up to 4.5k tokens of input, text as small as 10px and native rendering of 12 languages. Google lists legible text for infographics, menus and marketing assets among Gemini 3 image models' capabilities.

• Proofread the smallest line first. Every miss in our test was in the footer or the fine print, and some were digits ("16:90"). Read prices, dates and times against your source before anything ships.

When the text has to be exact

For prices, dates, legal lines or anything you will reuse across many versions, don't rely on a generator at all. Generate the artwork, with the headline if you like, then set the fine print as real text in Fuser's Compositor. Its text layers support custom fonts, variable font axes and fixed or auto-sizing text boxes, and you can export at the exact pixel size a placement needs. A price change is then an edit, not a re-roll. See social media image sizes for the dimensions.

Pick by job

For print-ready layouts with a lot of text, use GPT Image 2.5 Flare. For large outputs and clean menus or price lists, use Seedream 5.0 Lite, but check headlines for words you didn't ask for. Recraft V4.1 is the pick for designed typography and brand palettes. The Fuser node can also output vectors for wordmarks and logos; see the best logo and vector generators. Qwen Image 2 suits long, structured instructions for infographics and slides. We tested the standard tier; Alibaba Cloud's docs describe the Pro tier as having stronger text rendering. Nano Banana 2 is best when the text is part of a photographic scene, and it can be refined in follow-up edits. Use FLUX.2 when you need exact hex colors or multiple references, and check it for repeated lines.

FLUX.3 Image is the other model that got every character right at its defaults. When the position of each text block matters, Black Forest Labs recommends giving text "its own box" and quoting the words in it, using bounding boxes written into the prompt (BFL: FLUX 3 Image layout); our FLUX.3 Image prompt guide shows how. In our FLUX.3 Image vs GPT Image test, changing one date on a finished poster moved about half as many pixels with FLUX.3 Image as with GPT Image 2.5 Flare, though neither left the rest of the poster untouched; for a pure text fix, Ideogram 4.5 is the model we measured leaving most of a poster bit-identical.

Qwen Image 3 is the newer choice for dense layouts and non-Latin scripts: with Expand Prompt off it matched GPT Image on both prompts, and our Qwen Image 3 guide tests it on Chinese, Japanese and Korean, where a small mixed-script line was its weak spot. Ideogram 4.5 is the one for correcting text in finished artwork. Ideogram says that with its precise edit, "pixels the edit doesn't touch are copied exactly from your image" (Ideogram API overview), and in our Ideogram 4.5 vs GPT Image test a date change with Edit Precision set to High left 95.4% of the poster bit-identical. When you generate with Ideogram 4.5, switch Expand Prompt off. By Fuser's credit costs, a Qwen Image 3 image at 1K costs about two-thirds of an Ideogram 4.5 image at Medium.

For single-model detail, see the guides to GPT Image, FLUX.3 Image, Nano Banana, Recraft V4, Seedream, FLUX.2, Ideogram 4.5 and Qwen Image 3. For a full print layout, see the AI poster typography workflow. To change text in an image you already have, see the best AI image editing models.

Last verified October 2, 2026.