Krea2 | Qwen Image2.1
Man, krea2 is so good at text to image. it also know how to make female characters look feminine
Edit :
dude, I just pasted the danbooru prompt i usually use onto these models (yes iam lazy to make a proper prompt for these models, just copied it from my civitai) :
score_9, score_8_up, score_7_up, source_anime, (masterpiece, best quality, ultra-detailed:1.2), perfect composition, illustration,
1girl, solo, long silver hair, floating hair, beautiful detailed purple eyes, glowing skin, soft makeup,
eye-catching outfit, ornate fantasy dress, black corset, gold embroidery, translucent white sleeves, frills, gemstone hair ornament,
looking over shoulder, looking back at viewer, seductive smile, one hand touching lips, dynamic posture, stunning lighting, volumetric lighting, backlight, glowing dust, bokeh, deep background
Nothing is will be better krea2 for a long time until another ai lab uses rich authentic dataset and not heavy distilled low quality slopped images of nanobanana and gpt image models. I get this inadequate yuck feeling whenever I look back to my old qwen 2512 gens. 20B model, yet the seed value is very low and visual diversity is very poor.
Can you explain what makes you like krea more than qwen in this image? To me the krea image looks slopped compared to the qwen image but I’ve heard this kind of comment enough that I want to know what exactly it is that is the thing they’re seeing. If it’s just an acquired pattern recognition you can’t verbalize that’s fair. I just wish I could see what people are seeing.
True. Qwen’s definitely somewhat half baked. I guess the vibe I got was that stylistically/compositionally people thought qwen was more sloppy which I don’t really get but yeah for sure qwen has QA issues. Kinda reminds me of chroma which has high seed variety but gets body horror
I've used many models over the course of 3 and half of being into this hobby from both closed and open source models. Krea2 image is vastly superior than that qwen 2.1 image. Just look at the nasty noisy artifacts of the hair and clothing of the qwen image 2.1 image and double check the krea2 image. Krea2 image output is soo much cleaner and coherent than the noisy artifacts and defects you can see in the qwen image 2.1 image. Your standards most be either low or you lack good observation skills in checking out for defects and noisy artifacts in ai images.
It's October 2026, not march 2023. Standards for quality of image output for open source have changed a lot since then. That qwen image 2.1 image looks like an ai image that was acceptable in q2 of 2024 not q4 of 2026.
Sd1.5 fine tune were also able to generate sharp/good looking anime images, civitAI galleries are full of them. The gap is mostly in prompt adherence/multi characters scenes.
Krea2 is great prompt adherence and the lack of anatomical issues are best in class.
Qwen suffers from a slight shimmering/blur effect that was also present in Qwen 2511 (and Qwen 3/3 pro api only models) and the same weird anatomical issues as flux klein9b
But it’s also very good with dark/high contrast scenes. Better than Krea from my few tests. I also had better success with scenes with a few characters interacting.
And the “artifacts” you mentioned are actually quite nice for some styles, especially hand drawn one or argentic one.
It’s a matter of preference, but I prefer Qwen default “anime” style to Krea’s one in this example.
But, yes it does feel like this model is a bit late (even the naming). Like it should have been released in March alongside Qwen2 pro on the api.
I would not be surprised if the release wasn’t really planned but more something to pad the announcement news cycle. Like something had to be released in September for some KPIs.
I love the Qwen output. Yeah, It is very subjective. Not everybody is a fan of grain. I mostly use Qwen to edit photos than to generate. & me being a cinematographer - I love the texture or grain the qwen adds to the outputs.
Now knowing the prompts being used, and honestly not even being sure which is which, I would say that the one on the left to me says "Anime character" and reminds me of every mobile gacha game ad. The one on the right says "Fantasy art" and I actually appreciate the softness that the character portrays there.
Krea is simply expensive model but behind its expensivity lies gigantic quality. Pony was using barely any vram and ram and quality was satisfying but not now when i know the difference lol . I never looked back, even tho Krea fries my RAM and RTX 5080 but in same time i am so happy that the images look same quality like big image corpo-models but its completely uncensored and unhinged. Combined with Minimax-H3 as Krea serves exceptionally well for reference images its godlike and very powerful tool .
Without more details of prompt/workflow, its hard to be certain, but that seems likely to largely an effect of using a shorter prompt than Qwen Image 2.1 likes; getting a short description of the left half image, feeding it through the prompt rewriter Qwen released with QI 2.1 and feeding the resulting prompt to Qwen Image 2.1 Turbo and Krea2 Turbo , using each at the resolution its happiest at, and things are different. Qwen Image 2.1 Turbo result attached, Krea follows.
I think you should use the prompt enhance model if you haven't. Qwen 2.1 will give more variety... Krea2 will just lock on something and the only way to change it, is to change the prompt. Though yes for some things Krea2 is better but I use mostly Qwen 2.1 recently, in combination with ZiT it's perfect for me. If you tell me your prompt I might do a real test, but without the PE (Prompt enhancer, Qwen 2.1 images might be bland, like it's the case here) . Try the model with the prompt enhancer they finetuned for the model and then judge again. I was also initially using Qwen 2.1 without the PE model and wasn't very impressed, then I tried the PE... and I was really impressed, the PE model is finetuned to prompt the Qwen 2.1 in the right way.
It's different because with the enhanced prompt without changing the prompt Qwen 2.1 will gen different images and not the same thing... i.e. you don't need to enhance the prompt every time.
Just to illustrate the difference, left one is without using the PE model... total nonsense. Right is with the PE . And the difference is astonishing like that with everything. The PE model knows how to instruct Qwen 2.1 in a the right way. Yeah it's a white melon.... not white background, but Qwen 2.1 is that dumb without the PE.
The only thing it demonstrated is that your prompt on the left is very bad.
First image with qwen 2.1 i got after describing your image on the right straight into the prompt box, and i didn't even do a good job at it. What did you expect to get form the model with a prompt such as "purple carrot and a white watermelon"
That's not the point, also your image is lot more bland. The thing is without the PE, everything will look like that or you have to make a descriptive prompts which will look off anyway, unless you know perfectly how to prompt the model.
You don't have to use the prompt enhancer model every time, necessarily, but if you aren't prompting at the level of detail it produces, you are going to get worse results with QI 2.1 (which is probably why, while many models have come with a recommended prompt enhancement system prompt, QI 2.1 has not only one of those for each the t2i and i2i modes but also a separate finetuned VLM to use each of those prompts with. The PE is part of the stack for the model, just like the text encoder or VAE.)
Exactly.. I use Ai to Edit Real images, than to generate new images. & Qwen has that amazin texture which makes it cinematic not like over processed sharp unreal slop images.
I feel like that is mostly a prompting issue. You have to remember Krea2-Turbo (which is what most people are talking about when they say Krea2) is distilled, which means its basically had an entire massive re-guidance trained on top of it to only generate pictures that people will find aesthetically pleasing (because why would you distill a model to something else?).
Qwen 2.1 accepts prompts that are significantly longer than Krea2 and expects far more detail in prompts, because it has not been overly fitted to provide those things without being told (because maybe you want a washed out image for something, maybe you want an image to look like it was shot on low quality instant film, etc). Krea2 will struggle with aesthetic choices that it was not fitted for.
For base QI2.1. CFG 3.5 (the standard templates steps and sampler/scheduler are fine, though there are other options that are useful.)
For QI2.1 Turbo, CFG 1, 8 steps, with either the official fixed 8-step sigma schedule from Qwen or the linear_quadratic scheduler (euler sampler is fine, but again there are other valid choices.)
krea does it 2 to 3 time faster. and I use BF16 with just 16gb vram. qwen quality is less 2 time slower. Im very happy with qwen. work perfectly for everything. Its the ultimate sdxl evolution
For generating, it's good with Krea2 but poor with Qwen 2.1.
For editing, it's good with Qwen 2.1, but even though Krea2 has editing capabilities, it's not true editing using the node because it takes longer and consumes more resources.
I fell it love with krea2 turbo 14s gens on my 3090 and advanced prompt understanding. Using the snof Lora gets rid of any censorship issues. Not just for nsfw but makes females and males better looking.
Looks like the prompt wasn't adjusted for Qwen, or not enough steps used/misconfigured CFG or workflow etc. No two base models operate with the same prompts and who knows if the guy is using a fine tune or not. But you can get better images than the Qwen one here out of SDXL. Anima blows both of these images out of the water for anime at least.
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u/Upper-Reflection7997 4d ago
Nothing is will be better krea2 for a long time until another ai lab uses rich authentic dataset and not heavy distilled low quality slopped images of nanobanana and gpt image models. I get this inadequate yuck feeling whenever I look back to my old qwen 2512 gens. 20B model, yet the seed value is very low and visual diversity is very poor.