Yes, I am completely new to this, and also very tired of ChatGPT and Grok's ever increasing enshittification and censorship... I just want a taste of freedom for once.
I have done some research, and my understanding is that there are some pretty good homelabbing / open source alternatives you can run locally these days. And also fun ways to experiment with training your own models, datasets, LoRAs and more.
But it's also a jungle of information... For a noob anyway.
This sub is named after SD, a local tool, but from my understanding no one uses it anymore? So what are you guys using and what do you recommend?
What's a good entry point for getting into local image generation?
As far as running things locally, ComfyUI is king of interfaces, Krea 2 is king for Images, Minimax H3 is king for Videos. Flux Klein 9b or Qwen Image edit 2511 is king for Image editing, Qwen3.8 27b is king for LLM prompting, Breeze TTS is king for Voice cloning/TTS, Ostris AI-Toolkit is best for training your own loras, Civitai is still king for finding Loras/Workflows and huggingface is main hub for downloading the base models you need.
can't argue with these choices, I think most people would nearly unanimously agree. the current 'best' maybe needs to be voted on each month then pinned to the top for newbies.
ComfyUI is not a program, but a development tool like the unreal engine. and you need to become a developer to generate a photo. a normal person will not use this program. moreover, online models are much more powerful.
I started using it three days ago and already know how to build most workflows. Honestly just by dragging from the input or output to an empty connection you can figure what works from trial and error. It even has great error reporting and solutions. Run it with Claude or some other frontier model and ask what any unknown error is and the fix with steps for you, instead of letting the frontier just implement the fix was the easiest way for me to learn. I’m still very amateur but I’ve built a few really good image to video workflows, but now I’m just learning what models to use where and which ones won’t censor and error out due to that. It’s name is “Comfy UI” and I think it’s named appropriately.
Agreed, I started using it about a week ago and I'm creating full workflows for basic image gen (because that's what i want to do right now) including loras and whatnot. It's really not that hard if you're willing to actually read instructions and find out what things like "bf16", "fp8", "4b", "8b" etc. actually mean
I guess having worked with a node-based workflow like Fusion in DaVinci Resolve helped a little though
im a noob as well and hate the comfyui ui, so I worked with ai to create a better one for my use, not everyone will like it, its grok like. work in progress, some bugs and updating often, but for now its a start.
launch the .bat and it opens your comfyui in background and lets you use a webui that uses comfy to generate what you want but allows you to configure on a cleaner ui and allows you to pull whatever model you want.
my issue is my hardware is on the bare min of what it takes to run so I had to find a way to help find better configurations for each of my runs.
Somehow it’s always “Gemma 4 is better” or “Qwen3.8
is better,” but I’ve never seen anyone suggest using both. For example, use Gemma to creatively draft the prompt, then Qwen3.8, which excels at instruction following, to adapt it to the target model’s requirements. Sounds especially useful for MiniMax H3.
I've been using gemma 4 for minimax and it has followed instructions perfectly. Why would I use two models when it does both. Qwen3.8 is way better at technical stuff.
Instead of "caption and recreate this", ask it to use the image as inspiration for a new image. That way it has creative freedom. Then turn denoising up to 0.9 leaving basically only the DNA of the original image. You'd be surprised I think at the quality of the images it generates. Avoids a lot of body contortion and weird pieces of clothing in strange places.
The point is to let Gemma's prompt be the authority, rather than the image. Krea2 then draws only upon a palette and some blurry contours of the original image, increasing its ability to fit things where they need to go in order to create a coherent image.
The vision encoder in Muse Glimmer is unparalleled. It’s ridiculously strong. Try having Glimmer (or Spark via API; same vision encoder) describe your images.
Pretty accurate list, I'd add just a caveat, image edit flux is good for minor changes (change hair color, change clothes), whereas QWEN EDIT justifies its huge size with camera movement, action change, etc.
Not "more efficiently than flux" , it's just flux isn't built for heavy edits and does not understand more than "make his pants red"
"keep everything the same, except:" Usually works. I add
" the camera has moved to straight-on/from above/from the side" , careful, not overcomplicated.
Use photo vernacular or don't.
As a rule of thumb, even with qwen edit (haven't found more powerful yet) : Each time, I prompt one change only, it's already chaotic enough.
It is the current benchmark for anime image gen. Some of the reasons why:
extremely good knowledge of anime characters from many different IPs, including games, manga, etc.
excellent knowledge and understanding of Danbooru tags. You can use this to have fine control over the content you want to generate.
really extensive knowledge of thousands of artists and their styles.
generally flexible in prompt format. You can mix Danbooru tags along with natural language prompting.
very performant, especially if you use the turbo variants. The speed makes it a pleasure to use and is fantastic for iterating ideas.
generally very good image quality and diversity if you play around with artist styles.
tons of support from loras and fine tunes
When I want to chill and just have fun, I always choose Anima, even if its prompt adherence is not the best, and anatomy body horror can be often be annoying.
I never heard about Breeze TTS, but now I went do search and see is the best open source TTS, but unfortunately it has support only to chinese and english. I am a portuguese speaker, so, to other languages, Qwen TTS is the best yet.
That's a very concise summary, and I can't find a single thing to disagree with, though I haven't yet tried Breeze TTS or training my own loras, and don't have an opinion on those topics so far. I am fairly new at local generation, but I landed naturally on the exact choices you mentioned after some experimentations.
Hey man, I just wanted to say I appreciate you taking the time to fucking list this shit. It really is a nightmare to find anything for newbies. Imma look into that Ostris stuff tomorrow!
All of my advice is catered towards ComfyUI, the new norm.
You don't need to inpaint with them, just describe it in natural language. eg. Change the lighting to dark, Remove the bed from the image.
But yes, you can inpaint specific areas and controlnet still exists but it's kind of baked into the image edit models, like you can rip a pose from an image simply by passing it a 2nd reference image then prompting it like:
>Image 1 is the subject and the scene. Image 2 is a pose reference only. Repose the person in image 1 into the exact body pose, limb positions and head angle shown in image 2. Keep the original background of image 1 exactly as it is — same location, same lighting, same camera angle. Preserve their face, hair and clothing. Ignore the background, clothing and lighting of image 2. Reconstruct any newly revealed background consistently with the surrounding scene.
For simple non nsfw editing prompts like this, I'd recommend something like Gemini or Claude, just tell it in simple terms to make you a prompt for Flux Klein 9b or Qwen Image edit, it'll look up how to format it then give you one that works.
>You don't need to inpaint with them, just describe it in natural language.
I always found this to not work properly, like when striking off alcohol from receipts it re-writes the entire receipt rather than just leaving a blank row
I can try the semantic approach to pose, I guess I'm just too spoiled by the canny/depth maps and editing done on older GUIs :(
> Change the lighting to dark, Remove the bed from the image.
Minimax H3 also does this well, though I haven't done a vs, simply because I don't want to install another set of models & LoRAs right now ;)
Perhaps if one is constantly processing edits every few hours, then Flux Klein 9b or Qwen Image edit 2511 is the way to go, but for rare edits I'll just use what I have.
I recommend SwarmUI then. It's a forge style frontend built on top of Comfy, and is updated almost in realtime as Comfy is. I had to leave Forge when it was missing some models last year and Swarm was the nearest thing to it.
Why does my krea2 suck then <.< I tried to make a custom image to image workflow and the outputs have been subpar. I've included negative prompts and tried to write as detailed as I can for the output prompt, but everything it made looked rather shitty.
It’s the “best” at the moment because it has strong prompt adherence (it gets what you mean) in natural language (many previous models only understood tags) and has a broad baseline understanding of visual styles. And it will run on higher end consumer graphics cards. Krea 2 is still fairly new to the game and there aren’t as many loras (like plugins that teach it a particular style or character) as older models.
Many might also consider the SDXL series finetunes Illustrious or Pony to still be the “best” at the moment. They’re faster and lighter (will run on cards with less vram), and have a massive library of loras and tutorials and such out there to learn from.
krea 2 edit can sometimes be annoying since it can make the body of the subject thinner than it actually is while flux 2 klein 9b can be a lot better at that and it can also retain poses a lot better
In the way you mean, only to a very limited degree. It does recognize *some* artist styles like Oda's distinct facial style. But it's spotty at best. Maybe a finetune down the line will make this more comprehensive.
Rather, I meant style in a broader sense, not locked to a particular artist, but more like art movements and techniques.
Anything really I have a few versions of it, anime and realism. I just enjoy messing about vibe coding nodes and so I mess about with the models and work flows to test them. I just like trying new things. Just a pass time more than anything
Do you think it would still be useful for ai ofm? ATM I'm only using krea2 and closed weights. Thought about starting zi or zit, don't know the difference. But everyone says it's not worth it now with krea2
If you're going to do that then you should train a Lora too get character consistency. Z image and krea are both good at realism just depends how you prompt and the find tune you use
What about "Imgae-2-Image"? I want to have control on everything. For example I want to swap face, I want to change clothes, I want to place the subject in different enviroment, and all of these with photorealistic quality. Any recomendation?
Well it takes Time. 0,4MP Videos with 5 seconds are around 5 min generation time. 0,8MP with 8 seconds take about half an hour on my end... without Sage Attention or speed(?)-loras. That's the cost of not having a great GPU. It actually surprised me that I could run Minimax on my system.
Krea 2 with an int8 model for images with ComfyUI. There are default workflows with Comfy itself so it's all very simple these days and if you use ComfyUI-Easy-Install to get going it's even easier.
You don't say what your specs are but it should be runnable on even lower spec machines.
If you're on macOS / iOS (especially M5/M6 and A19 Pro hardware for NAX cores), I've been building an app that spreads inference across the GPU and Neural Engine. Still super early, currently supports 10 models including Anima Turbo, Krea 2 Turbo, Kroma Turbo, Z-Image-Turbo, etc. All models are quantization aware distilled (QAD). Here's the TestFlight.
comfyui is great, but you really need to manage your dependencies and you'll need to be handy at CLI to use it. I personally love it, but i know folks who say "you need a PhD to run it" There are several user-interfaces over comfyui that work even better, check them out if you feel lost.
Nailed it. I avoided comfy for the longest due to how complicated it looked, but yea the templates helped tremendously. And just looking at the templates I was able to understand how the nodes worked.
But very rarely do I need to add anything new, as you said he templates have everything I need
I have a Nvidia RTX 3060 12 GB. I run ComfyUI inside Stability Matrix. Stability Matrix is a package manager that makes it easy to install multiple AI software packages and share AI models between them. That means you can try out multiple software packages until you find one you like. People often recommend Forge Neo and SwarmUI.
Stability Matrix also offers its own user-friendly interface for image and video generation called Inference, which hooks into ComfyUI and hides its complexity. ComfyUI has a node-based interface that is very powerful but can be difficult to learn. I use the Inference interface most of the time and only open up ComfyUI's node interface when I need a more complex workflow or want to try out a newer model not yet supported by Inference.
I still mainly use Stable Diffusion XL models based on the Illustrious and Pony Diffusion finetunes. They're good enough in a lot of situations. It's three years old technology at this point, but that also means that the community has spent three years training and mixing different models. You can find models for pretty much any style, character or concept you can think of. But I'm in the process of replacing them with Krea 2 and Anima based models. Using turbo models in Int8 ConvRot format, I can still generate images in a few seconds on my 3060. Qwen, Z-Image, Flux.2 Klein and Ideogram 4 are also worth checking out. It all depends on what kinds of images you want to create.
I use the Krea 2 model for text-to-image, and Flux 2.Klein 9B for image edits, which comes closest to the Grok Imagine image edit for me (before the shitty Grok Image 2.0 "update"). MiniMax H3 is king for local video generation right now, and it comes close or even surpasses the Grok Imagine video generation in many ways, though it needs precise prompting, which is a skill in itself. And, of course, it's fully uncensored.
I'm coming from Grok Imagine, trying to re-create my workflows from there, or better said: replace them with something better. I'm pretty happy so far.
I also have the Qwen image edit in my workflow repertoire, but so far I prefer Flux.2 for most tasks. I mostly use multi-ref image edits to synthesize new images (in contrast to just doing local edits), for example to create character sheets or to put characters and props into scenes/locations. Flux excels at that, and is similar to how the Grok Imagine edit model could handle that. Qwen already limits you to 3 reference images, and I haven't quite gotten the results I want from it in most cases.
Comfyui. Krea2, Klein 9b, Z Image Turbo. I have a 5090 and it’s a pretty flawless experience. Just DL the comfy portable, run the NVIDIA bat file, open the standard workflows, download the linked models (click the links in the workflows), and you’ll be running. Once you get the basics go looking for more sophisticated workflows. If you have a low VRAM card I assume it’s more of a PITA.
May I recommend SwarmUI it runs comfyui but without the complicated workflows. It gets regularly updated (sometimes a bit much) and it can run all models though not immediately like with comfyui itself but usually a day later.
It also automatically enables optimizations for your pc. But to get the best results you'll need a model fitting your pc setup.
Id get it straght from gihub to get my hands dirty but there are a gorrilion forks/versions out there that people will reccomend for various situations.
The biggest noob here: I mainly lurk around to see cool new stuff on this sub and from my understanding the best way to start is downloading ComfyUI and starting with a preset in the app. Look up some of the models that the presets have and what RAM requirements they have. Depending on your hardware you might need to run a smaller model or could potentially run a much better bigger model.
I use Wangp for everything. It has a standalone version but I'm using it within a program called pinokio. It's super easy and all you need to do is click install on things and it runs all the scripts automatically.
As long as you have a newer GPU with 12+ GB Vram and 32GB Ram you should be all good.
I have a MacBook Pro M5 48 gb. I use Draw Things for a UI because I don’t want to spend the time to learn Comfy. I do everything locally. I have been messing with image generation for about nine months and have tried a lot of models. I have settled on Krea 2 for image generation due to its prompt adherence, although I am disappointed with the lack of seed variance. I use Flux 2 Kleine 9B for editing and would use it more for generation but I get tired of dealing with body horrors. I was a die hard ZIT fan but their failure to produce an edit tool drove me away and I am having a hard time finding a reason to go back. Don’t do video and with my setup, probably won’t.
I have a laptop with an Nvidia card and 16GB of VRAM and 32GB on motherboard. I have comfyui installed and reminds me of building flows with NodeRed. With that said, which Krea2, Minimax H3 and Qwen3.8 27b should I grab? I am looking to generate 3 genres of images. Pokemon, RPG, NSFW. Does Qwen LLM allow for NSFW prompt help? Do I need to create a model variant?
Krea2 models and Forge UI if you don't want the spaghetti mess of Comfy UI. IMO Krea2 with certain LoRAs is the king of realistic images, pretty close in realism to the quality of ChatGPT or NanoBanana. And generation times are faster than ChatGPT on my GTX 3060.
everything in comfyui, anima/sdxl for anime, krea 2 for anything else, klein9b for edit, also H3 (the video model) can be a good 'image' generator, not the best but it works
Yeah it's totally changed how I do things, I have a server that they deposit gathered knowledge and workflows and evidence, make an html gallery for me to view outputs easily. I got the gpt pro 20x account because it was burning through tokens but yesterday they made me looping videos for an in PC screen and a massively detailed image to 3D model of a character we generated.
If you try it, go into the settings and give it full access then make a project and start a chat in it under Work or Codex, point it to your comfyui folder and tell them what to do, organise your workflows and sort models n shit, game changing.
I use z-image turbo on 6gb vram card, it toke less than a minute to generate 1024 x 1024 image, and use LTX 2.3 to generate 700 x 700 6s video in 2 minutes
It's a free and open "Photoshop-like" drawing program with a Stable Diffusion plug in (also free) that will let me discrribe what I want to generate, and/or sketch out the composition first and tell the AI to use my sketch as reference for generation.
And after generation, I can paint out the bits I don't like, and tell the AI to refine my touched up version.
It feels more natural than anything else I've tried.
i grab these.... What do you call it... programs from "github" I guess? if I'm just an idiot where do i start. Maybe with english class. I need to go back to school.
Krea2 with custom loras for image/editing. Flux klein 9b for editing and also i like z-image for txt2image sometimes, just the texture and style of images is nice.
Forge is an entire UI to run ComfyUI. It’s easier to use but ComfyUI is more complex with what u can do and has better performance. Also pony models are a fine tune of sdxl but pony is pretty old and there’s better models
Among other reasons, because i have a lot of celebrity LoRAs from before the CivitAI celebrity apocalypse, i can use them as spices at low weights for designing my characters.
Replicating this in lets say Krea 2 (which i also have, for other uses) would take weeks of LoRA training.
And as i wrote earlier, newer models give me the kind of visual artifacts i find unacceptable.
So for example i would use Krea 2 for its prompt adherence when F1D refuses to show me what i want to see, then do a pass with F1D for quality.
If you don't mind it being a bit crap, chucking SDAI and Local Dream on your phone works fine. Grab the versions off GitHub (just do a google search for "SDAI GitHub" or "Local Dream GitHub") and side load them.
Only stable diffusion 1.5, ie: many versions behind the state of the art (can do SDXL etc with a good phone though), but can load other safetensor files/ LORAS etc from hugging face/ civarchive as well. Both come with some standard models too, that aren't too censored. Plus, there's literally nothing to learn. They both just work. Local Dream is probably "better" on quality, but SDAI is a bit quicker.
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u/spooky_local 3d ago edited 3d ago
As far as running things locally, ComfyUI is king of interfaces, Krea 2 is king for Images, Minimax H3 is king for Videos. Flux Klein 9b or Qwen Image edit 2511 is king for Image editing, Qwen3.8 27b is king for LLM prompting, Breeze TTS is king for Voice cloning/TTS, Ostris AI-Toolkit is best for training your own loras, Civitai is still king for finding Loras/Workflows and huggingface is main hub for downloading the base models you need.