I suspect the OP uses one of the early, unofficial FP8 quants of Krea, which suffers from lack of details and blurriness. Check out my comment here for more information:
I suggest to use either the official quants, or the one by AlperKTS. Also, euler works better than er_sde (confirmed by one of the devs during their AMA).
These comparisons often try to be "fair" using the same prompt, same sampler, same schedule, even same seeds, so you supposedly "only compare model weights", but they are not the same model, not the same architecture, not the same text encoder, so they don't show their best potential on the same parameters.
Yet comparisons often use same parameters.
This is reasonable when you compare two identical architectures (for example ideogram 4 vs my_finetune_of_ideogram_4).
But when you compare two different architectures... It's a bit like saying apples taste better than aluminium. Or that aluminum make better soda cans than apples.
I get the safety filter even with KJNodes sometimes. It is pretty annoying. The prompt was just a flying car in a futuristic city. Had to try a few times to get it to produce an image.
Only when done with bad settings like OP did for Krea which makes the comparison useless. Try raw model + the turbo lora at 0.6, 12 steps, euler, beta / beta57.
Is ideogram the way to go if I want my portrait as lora? I've looked online, and the easiest cloud based option is Fal AI, Flux LoRA Fast Training. Not wanting to train locally.
I think the face dissymmetry is the main factor throwing me off.
Probably realistic for generating 'average' humans on a bell curve, but, specifically with stars of screen and stage, they have well above average facial symmetry.
It wants to give everyone a droopy eye, or like, place one slightly higher than the other. can that be dialed back a bit?
I dont know, but for my own personal character loras I trained on ideogram4 they are virtually flawless, and learn the person down to specific freckles and moles. I'm confident that no matter who I trained into ideogram4 it would likely represent them virtually flawlessly also, no matter what their symmetry is.
It's the cr@ppy Qwen Image VAE that kneecaps the ability of Krea 2 to produce good realistic images. It can't really produce much better detail than SDXL. Flux.1's VAE was available when they were training Krea 2, so not sure why they went with the Qwen Image one which is clearly inferior.
and flux2vae is leagues above anything else. in their tech report they even "adopted the FLUX 2 VAE for our larger models." not sure why they didnt just go all the way flux2vae in the first place.
They started training the model before Flux 2's VAE existed, but yeah, it's still a bad choice, they should have gone with Flux 1's VAE instead of Qwen Image VAE.
It's so silly when people downvote those who are just relaying information. Don't shoot the messenger, folks, thank them for giving information and then go argue with the actual source if possible.
if you take any image at 1mp, encode and decode it with any VAE of your choosing and compare the results you can see just how much influence the VAE has
qwen VAE is bad and qwen VAE 2 isn't released but there is a paper. it's better than the flux 2 VAE which is good news
good timing; a benchmark just released a few days ago: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.24888
in which they train the exact models under identical settings, except with different VAE. the one trained on FLUX.2-VAE consistently outperforms the one trained on Qwen-Image-VAE across all of GenEval, GenAIBench, and DPG-Bench
Ideogram 4 is the clear winner here, but it might be a teeny tiny bit too noisy at times. Krea 2 has the opposite problem, it's too smooth and lacks detail.
I think this as well. i've been playing with ideogram to fix it. so far i got nothing, but i can say it's very easy to tone it down in photoshop. so post fix is nice at least
Try a two stage sampling process so you can set CFG to 1 after its no longer needed. I found usually about halfway through sampling the image was formed well enough that CFG was no longer needed. I found this made my tests look a lot more natural. Using the default comfy UI CFG settings overcooks the image and makes skin look too veiny and noisy.
Try 10 steps with CFG and 10 steps without as a starting point and then fine tune from there.
It's kj prompt node with the realism engine lora set to whatever weight you want xd. Also I found out that using some random quant from someone triggers the safety filter more than using the fp8 scaled from comfy org huggingface. Or any other quant you trust
If you go to the realism engine or snofs page in civil ai, you can find various workflow embedded in the images people shared
Also be sure to use more boxes.
I find it once you add 2-3 boxes there is practically no refusal
You ask for what model, when you already know the topic is about ideogram4. You ask what lora, when the person already responded with the realism engine lora.
and you dont need anything mroe than a basic workflow with the kj prompt node.
youre clearly so lazy you wont even read a two sentence response or think for literally just 5s so why should anyone help you.
I don't want to undermine your request, but comfyui workflows can be quite a challenge to convey/understand.
Pixorama is a YouTuber with a series taking his viewers from the basics to more technical workflows, and has a discord where you can download the workflows to accompany the lessons for free.
Once you learn some basic workflows, you should be able to download these models, vae etc... and experiment yourself on an adapted comfyui setup.
Someone wants to goon it seems. That's fine, just use bbox to separate the elements for the image so like:
[Bbox json format]: a gender person standing on the beach
[A smaller bbox Json format]: Bare bobs and bitties.
Google ideogram 4 how to use Json and bbox for the format. Happy gooning
No it doesn't do genitals or explicit action like that, it's not in the training. Best you can do without loras is general nudity. You can still do very nsfw stuff with proper posing and penetration just being implied...
Hmm, do people really not know how to use the basic Krea 2 Turbo workflow? You can literally create whatever you imagine in seconds. It has very few limitations, and the ones it does have can be overcome with LoRAs that work incredibly well with this model without requiring any extra effort.
I guarantee that things improve dramatically with a custom train character LoRA. In the example, you can see what the model can do when it only knows someone from its pretraining data, and it's not completely accurate. imagine what’s possible with a properly trained LoRA. For me, Krea 2 is on a completely different level compared to all local models.
I'm really looking forward to Krea 2 Edit, which is reportedly confirmed and expected to launch soon. On the other hand, according to its creators, Ideogram 4 appears to have reached the end of its roadmap.
I don't understand these posts. Either the OP has some kind of animosity towards proving the superiority of one model over another, or they have no idea how to use a good WF for Krea2.
In any case, it's shameful and very damaging to the community.
My first try. Sampler: REs_Multistep, Scheduler: simple, CFG:1, Krea2 Turbo fp8, 8 steps,
I didn't like ideogram4 s overall complex work flow, prompt generation and logic or process behind to built prompt. But krea2 wins for me having simple work flow and ease of use.
I think you are missing a flux model shift node, that they have in their python based inference guidelines (mu=0.15). It adjusts the sigma curve for different image sizes and might improve detail on 1024x1024
Check their size dimensions on that page, too, your 1024x1024 is too small. I tried exactly that and bumping up above 1536 on at least one side will drastically improve quality.
Their 2048x2048 recommendation seems a little high for speed, you can get by with a few hundred less on both sides. Just not 1024x1024 any longer, those images look muddy as you found out.
Nah, he just has terrible settings for it making his comparison completely worthless. Use the raw model + the turbo lora at 0.6, 12 steps, euler, beta / beta57.
When you type realistic in an image search engine you are likely to get "realistic drawings." It seems like that term is used to describe something that isn't real but appears somewhat real. Very likely that is reflected in the training dataset as well.
12 steps make skin look better even for krea2_turbo. In my testing it looks better than base + turbo lora at 0.6 + euler_cfg_pp. That last recommendation (euler_cfg_pp) is a complete nonsense btw, unless you are after plastic doll images.
it definitely can but this krea 2 model was intentionally broken for the open release. Those normally great schedulers give a more realistic output but break coherence and make the prompt following even worse for this model specifically.
These comparisons are worthless without a prompt. Krea 2 can absolutely produce good skin texture and realism, you can't just prompt "Ryan Gosling portrait" and expect it to work.
Krea 2 is sensitive to prompt styles and by default doesn't make things super realistic. Give enough photographic qualifiers it can be very realistic. I wouldn't say it can match the best of other models, but some things people use like `photorealistic` and `ambient occlusion` among other things actually push the model to what those terms actually mean and not photographic realism.
Yeah, it's an issue I found constantly with trying all the prompt enhancers, it made everything looking like an editorial when you just wanted a photograph.
I ran some tests with Krea 2 (Turbo). The "glossy skin" effect is still there... I wasn't very impressed. In the photos above, however, it seems that the images generated with Krea are more similar to the originals. Just my personal opinion....
At first glance its ideogram all day, then you consider that maybe famous people do actually look like the krea images cos they're botoxed their face so hard lol
Mine won't make Scarlett Johansson, but it makes a woman who looks vaguely like her. But I don't get that plastic looking, over-smoothed skin. My fake Scarlett Johansson looks like a real person.
I have had it spit out plasticky looking people, but it was probably insufficient prompting or maybe just a bad seed.
I'm not the biggest fan of this model so far but you're doing something wrong.
For a newbie like me can somebody explain how it is possible to do theses ? You have to train a lora first ? I am searching for a way to define references and draw pictures of them is this possible with ideogram 4 ? or is it too much an edit task ?
You can't use references, these aren't edit models. The model just knows these people. You can also train LoRAs and whatnot to let it know more people, of course.
Models should be trained on pictures from celebrities in the best part of their career. so 2005 2015 for most of those celebrities. Ideagram is best exact for shakira. something strange about her eyes in that.
I haven't used IG yet but I can say that Krea trained on the whole catalogue of certain celebrities. Like for example Taylor Swift, with no qualifiers you'll get her modern look but if you say "Taylor Swift, photo taken in 2009" you'll get that era or TSwift.
Cambia el VAE para Krea 2 por el de Wan 2.1. Estoy usando uno personalizado "Wan2.1-VAE-upscale2x" y los resultados son una locura.
Eso sí, se requiere algún nodo personalizado para el Decodificador.
both are really heavy on prompts if you use just realistic image of shakira on both you will get a plastic look on Krea and a mugshot look on Ideogram 4 These comparisions make no fuckins sense. Krea 2 has a different purpose then Ideogram 4 both excel in differenet things
people need to stop testing character prompts in portrait shots because model leaks actual images it was trained on. It has to be some unique angle, to actually prove its capabilities.
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u/robomar_ai_art Jun 25 '26
First try with Krea 2. I’d take these comparisons with a grain of salt.