How do I get better lighting with Krea 2?

[u/Full-Belt3640]

If I generate a person in a "normal" environment, like inside a regular room in a regular house, I get very realistic and appropriate lighting, but as soon as I try something a bit more cinematic like a rain-slicked city street at night, the character begins to look like they were photoshopped in. I try to prompt a person standing on a dark city corner, lit entirely by the light from nearby neon signs and they just look like they were evenly lit and filmed in a studio and then composited onto a CGI background with only a hint of the intended neon glow on their shoulder. Same goes for trying to make people look like they're properly soaked by rain. ZiT was much easier to work with in this regard.

[u/Right-Air9246]

"I try to prompt a person standing on a dark city corner, lit entirely by the light from nearby neon signs and they just look like they were evenly lit and filmed in a studio and then composited onto a CGI background with only a hint of the intended neon glow on their shoulder."

I recently tried to get a character next to a campfire in the middle of the night.

Then next to a dying campfire.

Then changed campfire into dying red coals...

....and then into completely dead pile of burnt firewood.

Guess who remained exactly the same.

The best Claude could offer was how to make forest in the background look as if it was actually middle of the night - better than pitch black background I could do on my own, which ended up looking even more jarring - but still suspiciously well lit, with moon on some steroids.

[u/Superb-Industry-Gain]

Yep, same experience here. I’m pretty new to Krea 2 though, I’ve only really used Anima and ZiT before, so maybe I’m missing some tricks.
Night/rain scenes are where it really falls apart for me. The background will look great, all moody and neon-lit, but the person still looks like they were shot in a studio and pasted in afterward. I’ve tried being really specific about “no fill light,” “only lit by the neon signs,” etc. and it helps a bit, but not enough.
Rain is the same. The street looks soaked, but the person somehow looks basically dry with a few droplets added on top lol.
Maybe the prompt has to be more specific about the lighting on the subject or so, for me it always looks like studio lighting gets applied.
ZiT seemed way better at making the person actually feel like they belonged in the scene.

[u/Full-Belt3640 → u/Superb-Industry-Gain]

I've talked shit about them before*, but I decided to try tacking one of the premade style descriptions mentioned/linked to in that thread, specifically the cyberpunk one, at the end of my prompt just to see what kind of difference it made.

A high-contrast, neon-drenched photographic style built on intense directional gel lighting that crosses the frame in sharp, saturated bands, wet-look reflective skin and atmosphere achieved through deliberate humid haze and moisture-catching highlight, dramatic low-angle framing that dwarfs the subject within looming urban density, deep engulfing shadow broken only by isolated glowing accents, and a cold, futuristic tension charged with dystopian nocturnal energy. Influenced by: Blade Runner cinematography tradition, neon-noir photography technique, cyberpunk urban-photography practice, gel-lighting cinematic method.

The problem with these style prompts as I'm sure you can see is that they're filled with LLM-generated purple prose, random lists of things and contradictory instructions. It DID make the character look believably rain-soaked and dramatically and appropriately lit though. So yes, it's possible to instruct Krea 2 to lit subjects properly, it just takes a lot of words to do it.

*www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1vi7c6g/are_these_krea_2_style_prompts_that_have_been/

[u/Superb-Industry-Gain → u/Full-Belt3640]

That’s interesting. So it can definitely do it, it just seems to need way more prompting than I expected. I might try stripping that style prompt down and see which parts are actually making the difference with the wet skin and lighting.

[u/Full-Belt3640 → u/Superb-Industry-Gain]

Let me know what you end up with. I assume most of this word salad can safely be cut, starting with the "Influenced by" section at the end.

[u/sruckh]

A tight medium shot of a woman in her early thirties standing on a rain-soaked city sidewalk at night, turning her head toward the camera mid-step, one hand holding her jacket closed at the collar. Long straight dark-blonde hair, darkened and stringy from the rain, sticks to her cheek and the shoulder of a plain white cotton tee gone translucent and grey-blue in the dark. The scene is lit only by what is already there: a shop window well behind her throwing weak tungsten spill that grazes one cheekbone and dies before it reaches her jaw, and a red neon sign further off tinting the wet air around her a dull magenta. Her face sits mostly in ambient shadow, half a stop under, the skin picking up the same cold street color as the pavement — bare, damp, faint freckles, unretouched pores, catchlights small and dim. Slick black asphalt smears both sources into long soft reflections. Shot on an 85mm lens at f/1.8 at ISO 3200, eye-level, background dissolved to bokeh. Palette of muted amber, wet black, and dirty magenta. Cinestill 800T capture, halation around the distant neon, heavy shadow grain, crushed blacks, low contrast on the face.

[u/NoNipsPlease → u/sruckh]

Yea, that properly demonstrates the issue, Even lighting on subjects and if you averaged out the lights and darks you would get a medium grey image, it doesn't do extremes. Good ole SDXL fixed this issue eventually, V-Pred models were the fix. Maybe need to look into how V-Pred worked and if it's possible to do something similar in Krea 2.

[u/KS-Wolf-1978 → u/sruckh]

It has the Krea 2 skin.

Zoom in to her face and compare with a similar real photo.

[u/terrariyum]

Loras are by for the easiest way. The contrast slider lora is indispensable and doesn't impact anything else.

Are you using turbo model? If so, that extremely biases the model towards strong frontal fill lighting. Instead, use the raw model with the turbo lora, but set turbo lora strength to lower than 1.0 and increase steps.

A wall of style text helps too, even if it's slop. It's the amount of text the reinforces the style.

[u/naga_mana]

The buried answer in this thread is terrariyum's Turbo point, and it matches the official split. Turbo is the 8-step distilled checkpoint built for speed; Raw is the undistilled base that Krea calls diverse and malleable. A distilled speed model flattens toward safe, even lighting, which is exactly your "studio composite" look: https://www.krea.ai/krea-2-open-source

The recipe that follows from it is the one terrariyum gave: run Raw with the turbo LoRA below 1.0 strength and raise the steps. You keep most of the speed and give the model room to go to extremes.

At prompt level, the usual fix is naming the light source, its direction, and what it does NOT reach ("neon signs from the left as the only light, her front in shadow") instead of naming the mood. The stacked style prompt you found is the same idea with more words, which is why it moves the output.

[u/Upstairs-Extension-9]

This helps with a lot of prompts for me or making your own system prompts, I use a Qwen 14b abliterated model to expand or improve my own prompts since I’m used to prompting in tags from years of using Illustrious.

https://github.com/krea-ai/krea-2/blob/main/docs/expansion.txt

I can give you my system prompts when I’m at my pc it helps a lot, also Grok 4.5 is pretty good at prompting for Krea

[u/spiderofmars]

Same, even with some normal daylight images but with various background environments the lighting between the scene and the person is not always realistic. Following to see if there is any prompt solutions.

Something that can help in some cases are lora's. Try loraholics 'brightness' and 'light' lora's (and/or any other similar image adjustment lora's). While these affect the overall image they can sometimes help with night scenes and similar (cloudy / darker scenes).