@TheseAlpacas i will test after work tonight but yeah basicaly want to edit anime references.

@TheseAlpacas nice thank you!

so true :D

Qwen has edit and reference capabilities.

Who is 'we'?

I'd never ditch Qwen for Krea currently. Krea is superior, what Qwen does have the advantage with for some things it editing and it is a different flavour, it will replace Klein for me which I used for editing stuff that Krea edit couldn't do (and tbh as good as Krea edit is it's still just a community project, Krea3 will blow away Qwen and Krea2 in all departments)

Overall I'd pick Krea2 if editing isn't that important to you but ultimately both are great. I'd spend the majority of time with Krea2 and get Qwen with a few lora's for editing or for when I want a different flavour/vibe from Krea.

I will be moving to Qwen2.1 as more lora and community support catch up with Krea2; Not because I think its superior, but having one model that 'does everything' is hugely convenient and saves on HDD space :)

Qwen 2.1 is massively superior to krea 2 (I say this as someone who loved Krea 2, & used it 90% of the time before Qwen 2.1 came along).

It has a much higher skill ceiling to get good results back from presently, however; though it can generate hardcore nsfw images right out the box, & with nothing other than the base model. It's edit capabilities are especially first class (though totally confusing relative to what everyone is used to).

Qwen 2.1 is going to have some real growing pains with the workflow regarding how Alibaba expects it to be used...but the community will accept it when they realise what it's capable of, or the rest of the community dumbs the workflow down to get it to that level. For right now; you're pretty much forced to to use their accompanying LLM models that released with it to get anything good out of it though (that, or a whole load of patience lol).

Once a good 4/8 step lightning LoRA comes along for it, & more LoRAs in general, then I think it'll really take off.

I've been around the generative AI community since early SD.

After spending a lot of time messing with it, I feel that Qwen 2.1 is objectively superior by nearly every metric. Krea 2 was hands down the best of the last generation of local i/t2i but Qwen 2.1 feels more like the first of the next gen.

It does love verbose prompting though, lol. There's a reason that the devs don't recommend using it without a PE LLM. That's likely going to be the case for all generative AI models going forward though.

For prompt writing, I'd highly recommend the HauHau version of qwen3.5 9b on HF instead of the official version of the same model that they just released. I was already using it for Krea 2 and other models as a PE so I wasn't too surprised when Q3.5 9b was officially recommended for use with Qwen 2.1. It's a prompt writing wiz but the two new variants that they released in the main Qwen 2.1 repo are a little wacky unless you're fluent in Chinese.

Also, both Qwen 2.1 and Krea 2 use Qwen VAEs which means they really need a nyquist notch node for higher resolutions. That just removes the noticeable 'screen door' effect without blurring or harming the image.

Krea 2 for image gen and qwen 2.1 for edits

@TheseAlpacas whilst this wasn't directed at me, I'll still answer (cause I'll still use Krea 2, & do like it still).

1. It follows the conventional paradigm of text prompting that's easy to use/everyone already knows. You can have fun just goofing around without needing a side LLM (spontaneously generating creative random images on the fly).

2. It can't compete on realism; but it's still a beautiful style close to quasi-realism that I like.

3. It generates faster/better quality (as of present at the lower end); I can generate a really nice image in 20-ish seconds in Krea 2 @ hires. Qwen Image 2.1 is way better quality (& I can generate fast-ish images also), but the quality suffers with the present lightning LoRAs, etc). This will probably be fixed soon once FP8, etc, is mainstream integrated into every UI, & someone like Wuli releases a 'definitive' 4/8 step LoRA though.

@vrgamerz258 "There's a reason that the devs don't recommend using it without a PE LLM. That's likely going to be the case for all generative AI models going forward though."

I think so. Ming Image have gone the same route.

I think the natural course of things is that all this is just going to be seamlessly integrated straight into most UI frontends in the future (so there's no back & forth separation, etc). It just feels clumsy/annoying to use right now, but someone had to be first to aggressively try to force that paradigm shift. The whole situation reminded me of Ideogram "Why can't I just generate images with a simple text prompt" friction most users felt.

@TheseAlpacas Thank you

I'm not certain what you are asking. 'er_sde' is a sampler and 'simple' is a scheduler. The recommended combo for this LoRA is 'er_sde' as the sampler and 'beta' as the scheduler.

If you're using ComfyUI then they are both included as options for the default Ksampler but if you're using something experimental like a ClownSampler then a 'er_sde/beta' combo won't be available due to the way the math works for those.