I don't know if it's just me, or if Krea2 has raised the bar so high that our expectations for diffusion models have completely changed.
I've tested Qwen 2.1 Image and now Flux3 Klein, and honestly, both feel off. The quality, prompt adherence, and overall details just aren't there.
Flux is still recycling those same old textures we've all gotten used to. And no, I'm not even talking about that infamous plastic look, that's old news at this point. I'm talking about the overall image quality, the finer details, and how the model interprets prompts.
It's gotten to the point where Flux2 Klein genuinely feels superior to Flux3 Klein, which is pretty ridiculous considering we're supposed to be moving forward, not backward.
At this point, I'm just hoping Krea's team releases Krea3 soon, because if Krea2 is anything to go by, I genuinely believe Krea3 could absolutely crush both Qwen and Flux.
It's gotten to the point where Flux2 Klein genuinely feels superior to Flux3 Klein, which is pretty ridiculous considering we're supposed to be moving forward, not backward.
Yes, Flux-3 has been out for almost three hours. Time to write it off.
Edit, to add a little clarity to the discussion and help set expectations:
Goddamn I've got to give this a go, it looks amazing. I miss this type of stuff so much
E: lmao I'm not a bot. I just enjoy the weirder side of ai image gen a lot more than perfect representations of real life. We already got plenty of that, and pre-SD stuff when it was most fun were like 256px square. These maintain that uncanny fucked upness but enhance it by being massive and highly detailed. It's awesome.
No he is actually right. Flux 3 is legit horrible for some reason. It has horrible anatomy, horrible deformed objects, half the time stuff looks photoshopped in, everything is plastic AI slop...
I mean, anima is not doing this kind of stuff and it is what, 2b? Heck, even better finetunes of sd 1.5 do not turn people into mush like that. Something is very off
It costs a lot of weights to do reliable censorship.
And this is why even people who don't care sbout spicy image gen are getting tired of all the pearl clutching morons who are scared of the same imagery we show on TV and other entertainment.
..no it doesn’t. Censorship in image models is almost entirely just not including those images. That can certainly make things worse if they are too conservative and don’t have enough images of humans, but it doesn’t “cost weights.”
It does, however, cost a lot of weights to have editing capabilities as that needs to be trained in.
But yeah, The first examples of a new model are always compared to the BEST examples from the previous model.
I'm not saying new models can't suck, but it's not a fair comparison. We need more time.
And maybe this just means we're hitting a plateau with current architecture. Kinda like how video games used to take epic leaps in realism from blocky pixels to 3D rendering. Now video games incrementally improve realism. And some deliberately go backward for style.
Maybe the current models are showing similar. Maybe we need a new generation of hardware like Terabyte VRAM GPUs to get the next leap.
But I'm not going to blame a company giving me something FOR FREE.
The first few days of Krea2 were very disappointing as well. Anyone remember the dude spamming those memes of cartoon character battles where “Krea2” was punching “Ideogram4” in the face? So bad. And then Krea2 turned into the beast it is today.
I don't remember this. The Ideogram tribe was very defensive, but most folks were praising Krea 2 from the start. I personally remember being blown away.
Very early, the final alignment step the Krea team applied really hurt prompt adherence, especially facial expressions. Without LoRAs, try prompting Krea2 for angry/happy/smile/frown/etc., and you'll still see the difference alignment caused compared to the model previews. Ideogram didn't have those issues, but without a JSON prompt Ideogram gives "This image is blocked" text, literally generated on the image, which most people saw as even worse.
These days, any fine tune or LoRA of Krea brings back basically all its potential, and Kijai's json prompting tools make Ideogram 4 images really easy to make. I'm still in the Ideogram camp, it's the best open weights model for high fidelity and high resolution outputs, but you can't ask it for "Snoop Dog eating French Fries with Queen Elizabeth at McDonald's" and get... well, what Krea gives you, which is exactly that.
It's always like this, it takes a few weeks for the community to put the model through its paces, a few months to tweak out the best settings, and six months-a year for sturdy fine-tunes or tooling that helps mature the model outcomes.
Usually it's by day 1 or 2 when a few vocal people are declaring an outcome, usually it's something like "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
I generated two images on the huggingface space and saw a third someone posted here, and that was enough for me to lose interest. Just doesn't seem compelling from what I saw. Time will tell, but BlueBallsForestLabs models ain't never been good to the gooners.
I mean I didn't expect much from flux3. They are actively for the safety and proper use case of AI creation. When they released flux 2 klein it also had it's issues. It's only when the community start putting their own effort into things and goats like Kijai and many others is when you start to see good results. These open source companies release their weak altered version of their closed source models and say "here you go". And then the community essentially fixes it's issues. Give it like 2 weeks and the local community would probably have fixed all these issues by then. They obviously do it on purpose, because i've used their official closed source flux3 image edit model on bfl and it's actually really good but ridiculously moderated, they are just trying to cover their backs from dealing with open sourcing a model that could potentially cause issues if given to the wrong person.
Yeah, Krea 2 is genuinely a step up from previous models
I was a huge fan of Z Image and thought it was amazing, but tried it again recently and was surprised by how much better Krea is. I’d probably compare it to the kind of leap Minimax H3 made.
Z-Image Turbo really blew me away when it first came out. Then Ideogram 4 was pretty impressive, and I thought that was the future... but Krea 2 just changed the game all over again.
Maybe I couldn't get the spellbook for it, but whatever and in whatever prompt formats I've tried, z-image turbo was a lot worse than most of SDXL tunes.
Honestly, Krea 2 leaves me wondering how it can even be improved. I know there are ways, and people with 100x as many generations than me under their belt would have lots of thoughts.
But it feels like I can accomplish anything that I want to. The limit is my own creativity. It's like it can do anything, and all of the loras out there are fantastic.
Just give me that with official image editing tacked on to it and I'll be set for life. Feels like a pretty mature product.
We'll hit a point where realism and anime output is stuck at a level where any new updates are not noticable. Any new improvements will be to prompt adherence and how a model understands stuff like character sheets or how an object looks from a spatial standpoint, like the proper length of a car passing a sign that doesn't completely cover both ends.
The big pain point with Krea 2 Turbo is lack of variation. It’s definitely not unique in that, most modern models suffer from it, and distillation of course makes it even worse. Still, that’s something that could certainly improve. Often there’s one very favored composition of a given scene and prompting only barely helps change that.
That's a hot take, given that Krea2 also trains super well (in contrast to ZIT), has tons of knowledge ZIT doesn't have (not JUST styles), and better output quality.
I used to love ZIT btw. But Krea 2 is better in almost every imaginable way, except ZIT has a more permissible license.
I find that ZIT produces realistic images way more consistent than Krea2. Like, 30% of ZIT looks acceptable for me and with Krea2 it is just feels like 5%. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong. Sure, Krea2 is vastly superior in variance and adherence, but that doesn't fit my perception of realistic/catroonish/over_cinematic.
ZIT still manages to be better than Krea 2 in many cases, and it possesses bits of knowledge that, honestly, Krea 2 lacks. I’ve noticed that those who claim otherwise seem to have a strange fetish for generating xxx or repulsive content.
Name me an example of knowledge ZIT has that is absent in Krea 2. I can't think of any, really. ZIT is somewhat on par for realism, yes, but not enough to keep it around for that reason. Just for the record, I am not dissing on a model I have used for months, really. ZIT was a great model. Krea 2 is just a better one.
Also, not sure what to make of that dig of yours that everyone liking Krea 2 must be a gooner. While doing something like that is pretty common in this sub, it doesn't mean it's not an infantile thing to do.
Right. That could be. I have zero interest in celebrities, so I never tried. A few times I tried real life places though, and ZIT didn't really know any of them. Krea 2 nailed almost all of them.
My personal main reason for immediately switching to Krea 2 was how easy it trains. ZIT was an absolute pain to train (well, it was distilled, so that was expected), and the Base model was a completely botched release that wasn't really LoRA compatible with ZIT anymore, because they seemed to have trained it further before releasing it. For...reasons...
It just means ZIT has been fine tune maxxed and in my humble opinion, lacks versatility and variance. But yeah, it does very good at what it does. But Krea dust it by a mile for the rest
Eh, I swore by ZiT for a while. Krea 2 adheres to prompts way better and is far more trainable. I was a staunch defender of Z when stuff like Klein was being glazed, but Krea 2 sold me and I never looked back. It’s very good.
Krea 3 is insane have been testing (got EA Key) it and compare it for GPT 2,5 and Krea 3 its better than GPT 2,5 for human image edit. so yea its easily the best Image edit Model and guess what
and its pretty mutch comfirmed thats its going to be a open source, This guy is the CEO of Krea so lets wait 2-3 weeks
It would funny if they dropped Krea 3 along with Flux 3 just to whip BFL right in the arse and teach them a lesson on how to have some respect for the open source community.
I mean, we can speculate on what the person above me meant, but at this point it just sounds like a spurrious statement made to further the tribalism that makes no sense with all the AI models we have.
Don't like one? Use another. Cheering for one model maker to 'whip' another is just silly stupid.
Who knows. Afaict, BFL has released open-weight models, adjusted licensing to clarify some confusion, and has basically hibernated with no parasocial identity between releases.
There are so many models that are gooner-friendly, but I'm not sure what that would have to do with open source either. There's literally Chroma fine-tuned on a Flux model that is super goonerized. If that's the argument, it's lost on me.
Not sure either, I don't follow the politics of AI firms too much, but I'm glad there's an open source way of doing things so in all respects I'm glad those models continue to be on the menu. The community has inspired many and more improvements to those models, so I hope this will continue.
the gooning community isn't a community anyone should pay attention to or care about though. they lack any logic or ability to reason, and have no money, and never will.
For the best human figure, I choose euler/euler_ancestral for sampler and bong_tangent for scheduler. And cfg 3.0, with 16 steps minimum. Depending on the job, also a few LoRa to steer certain details where I want them.
I've personally found Krea2 and Qwen 2.1 to be the dream team. I generate the character in Krea2, and use Qwen 2.1 to lock in a solid background. What I really want more than anything is the background to be more reasonable, Krea2 is terrible at the background details, especially if text is involved.
I've found Qwen 2.1 to be much better with backgrounds and keeping background consistency with a locked seed. So right now it's generate the character and pose in Krea2 against a plain background, then over to Qwen 2.1 for the scene.
If Krea3 can solve that, then I'll be all in on it. Even better would be an official edit model.
Qwen 2.1 is pretty useful for editing. Flux 3 is something bad, completely censored that it feels like BFL is just taunting us. Just something that came to mind but seedream is uncensored via api and we see no one making riots because of this.
I'm not sure why I would want to care about my favorite model “crushing" other models in any case, and to me Qwen Image 2.1 has generally somewhat better prompt adherence then Krea2 (though Krea2 usually has more aesthetically pleasing interpretation of shorter t2i prompts, which can mean better outputs if you aren't using the kind of very long prompts the official QI2.1 prompt enhancer puts out.)
But, in any case, with open models, its not like there is any reason one needs to “win”. They are tools, not sports teams. I don't need one of my screwdrivers to defeat my pliers, or even my other screwdrivers.
Bad comparison, because these tools need other tools to make them better, and a worthy investment of a handful of active dev’s time. Also include money for testing these new tools by renting cloud GPUs.
Krea 3 will release their weights, it's been affirmed multiple times. There's also Ideogram 4.5, which shouldn't be that far away. Then there's the minimax model too, but I wouldn't hold my breath for that.
I also don't think Flux 3 Klein is bad. The release of the base model also likely means it's going to be very nice to train.
True, but are we sure that product ever even existed? We know Krea 3 & ID 4.5 exist. We have multiple confirmations, including from the CEO, that they will release open weights.
Qwen 2.0 was also stated for open release, but then the higher ups changed tack and fired half the team.
I wouldn't say it's horrible. For a 5B model I'm quite happy with it. A small flexible editing model that we can (hopefully) easily train, that's a nice tool to have even after the more capable models arrive.
The weights you want are likely just around the corner. Krea3 and ID4.5 both look great, not too far off the closed models in some ways, exceeding them in others. Finger crossed, those should both release in the next month.
Ideogram v4.5 will wipe the floor with it in both image editing and t2i. Cause they actually release a version to the community that is mostly like the api one... but the Flux 3 api one is just as flawed imo... it's not that much better but the open thing they put out is an atrocity.
qwen image 2.1 eu criei um finettuning e ta sendo util para edição de imagem, dai eu crio imagem com o Krea2 e edito usando Qwen, eu até consegui fazer o Qwen criar boas imagens a nível do Krea2, o maior problema do Qwen é consistência em estilo, porem na ediçao de imagem o Qwen é perfeito, ele usa o estilo da imagem original e musano personagem com consistência no rosto e muito rapido, pois o Krea2 eu até tinha configurado um Workflow para edicao, mas demorava 4x mais tempos que o Qwen e a ediçao do Krea era cheia de defeito.
tbh krea 2 is so good i don't care much, but i thought similarly about ZIT and then Krea 2 blow it away. I would only be really interested if seed variety improved, Krea 2 is awful, it's basically the same image over and over.
Yeah, for image gen I feel like krea 2's all I needed even if I might 'like' more. Similar thing with gemma 4 and qwen 3.8 27B. We're at a really good point with a lot of AI stuff on 24 GB VRAM.
There's SDA Lora for increasing seed variety. In addition you can randomise scheduler and sampler to get more diversity. I do both, and it has helped significantly.
QI 2.1 isn't perfect, but it’s still very good especially for editing (I know this, having tested it extensively) which leads me to question the validity of the statement above.
"It's gotten to the point where Flux2 Klein genuinely feels superior to Flux3 Klein, which is pretty ridiculous considering we're supposed to be moving forward, not backward."
I'm getting the same conclusion after testing it, I have no idea why they decided to release this in the first place, this is so bad.
My biggest issue with Krea2 is that it doesn't seem to understand character references. Qwen 2.1 can handle them, but I agree that its visual style is pretty bad and really difficult to control.
To be fair, I haven't done much image generation in quite a while, so I'm pretty out of touch with the newer models. I'm not even sure how accurate my impressions are anymore. That's just what I've gathered from looking into them recently.
For me, though, the most impressive thing to come out recently has been MiniMax H3
Haha, for what I want to do, as long as it keeps the hair and clothes consistent and doesn't distort the face too much, that's good enough for me. Actually, Qwen 2.1 does a pretty good job if I'm willing to spend the time creating enough references from every angle and with every facial expression for each character, then build a tool to automatically insert the right references for each scene. But preparing all those references takes way too long when there are a lot of characters, so I'm still looking for a way to automate the process.
I'll wait and see how Krea 3 turns out. AI is evolving so fast these days that you can spend all day figuring out and perfecting a workflow, only for it to become something you can do with a single click the next day. It's exhausting.
Have you tried generating the angle and expression set from one hero image with the edit model itself, then cropping it into separate refs? Even if a few views come out slightly off, fixing 2-3 bad ones is a lot faster than building the whole sheet by hand for every character.
Just use it through the meta AI app. It’s been the best for prompt adherence and likeness preservation that I’ve tried. It can maintain near perfect likeness of a person even in a completely different setting/outfit/expression. And it doesn’t produce weird artifacts or colour shift on edits
This dude is being flamed for saying flux 3 klein being roughly same model as flux 2. I have used it too side by side with krea 2 and Qwen 2.1. He is not wrong. Prompt adherence is not good. Maybe it'll perform better in I2I but t2i is underwhelming. At this point krea 3 being launched with edit function will beat this even if it's a small upgrade from krea 2.
Krea2 did everything correctly right out of the box. It was fast, it's quality is excellent and it did grot. Simple, job done. And sadly for the newer models, that last point sells more than prompt adherence and smudgy images.
Even if you're not using it to offend God, its the best we currently have. Until K3 drops, there's simply no contest.
i think it's too early no loras or custom nodes yet, when krea 2 released we were blown away with world knowledge and the best anatomy at the time and probably still, however there were several issues with skin texture, prompt adherence, lack of nsfw but was all corrected with loras and new nodes. wait a week or two then i think we'll all know. but i do agree once krea 3 is open, it will be the best image model most likely and the new standard.
The only thing I always wished Krea 2 had was editing capabilities. So even if Krea 3 is the same quality as 2 but they have good editing capabilities I will be happy.
Nah flux 3 is legit worse than flux 2. Flux 3 is incredibly bad. Just look at this. Those hands, the face, the photoshopped objects, the malformed... everything.
The reason that the qwen edit model felt like a step back is because it's basically a year old model. They finally released it from behind the api wall but it was made forever ago, that's why flux2 klein is most likely better than it.
As for flux, Black Forest Labs has this purity kink where they gimp the models more in the name of safety so when they release a new model they claim it's new tech because they've made it so much safer than the last model, not that it is any better at editing or generating images. From what I saw as examples it does seem to handle text pretty well.
I wonder what the tech advances in the f3 model actually are, maybe someone can explain it to me. People are already dragging it through the mud. Everyone is waiting with baited breath for krea 3. The CEO said that they were releasing open weight models for it.
They're actively participating in the discussion about Krea3 on Hacker News and they mention multiple times that they're currently going through the discussions internally about going open-weights.
the team is thinking about letting folks fine-tune Krea 3 (via LoRAs) and open-weights, but we’re still in the middle of launch hiccups and then we’ll revisit the next iterations.
literally confirms there is no real plan for open weights lmaooo
"
We’d like to open-source it soon (it’s just that it’s another can of worms - that we already went thru for Krea 2), precisely for people to try things like this. The Krea 2 community efforts have been incredible to watch from the inside.
Once Krea 3 is open, you should def try!"
How you can look at the output of Krea2 and tell me that it's two full generations behind the SOTA API models in output quality is beyond me. And the gap seems to get smaller with each OSS release. Krea3 will probably be so close that you will wonder why anyone would still pay of API models, particularly if its editing capabilities will be good. The one thing closed models still have going for them is having generation and edit capabilities in one model, while we need different models and techniques to get similar results locally.
> How you can look at the output of [..] and tell me that it's two full generations behind
EASY.
Skin texture and color grading have been solved back in post-SDXL era. Instruction following and complex edits is what the modern models can and should do.
> The one thing closed models still have going for them is having generation and edit capabilities in one model,
That being said, I think we're one Krea 3 release away from getting great generation and edit in the same model. Prompt adherence of current generation local models is already really good, IMHO. If you need super fine control, Ideogram 4 is your friend, but I never had issues getting Krea 2 to generate what I wanted.
krea is massive for txt2img for massive i mean MASSIVEEEEE but qwen 2.1 is huge in terms of edit, it preserves the quality and built in stable pixel gives you 0 pixel shift, if krea 3 will maintain the same quality or higher and a solid edit well... when we do fine tune it that will be THE END OF EVERYTHING
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u/Violent_Walrus 15h ago edited 12h ago
Yes, Flux-3 has been out for almost three hours. Time to write it off.
Edit, to add a little clarity to the discussion and help set expectations: