After extensive testing with my Fluxmania models, I discovered a surprisingly effective method to eliminate unwanted banding and visual artifacts that can occasionally plague outputs. The solution is simple, but surprisingly overlooked: using the SDXL v1.0 Refiner for a single, ultra-light pass.
Generate your base image with your usual workflow or this one.
Then apply a first refinement pass using SDXL v1.0 Refiner.
Set denoising strength to a very low value: 0.02.
12 steps are sufficient — more won’t necessarily improve results.
Link Fluxmania image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D0t0b4mUYb3aPcjW8PUqUBTM06Ux0PtC/view?usp=sharing
Link Fluxmania + Refiner: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KCxZh7OxCTXxQWtz1zewbwgDcd1hvP2k/view?usp=sharing
Obviously this trick works with any other flux model and is applied before upscaling which will naturally highlight the artifacts even more