Memes
Lets start review of KREA 2 Turbo with memes.
hoho meme
or Woman yelling at a cat type of meme
Generated by KREA 2 Turbo:
What is so special there? this:
exact image used as meme template. No something like scene recreation from prompt. The models know the meme. Like Nano Banana 1/2 or ChatGPT Image 1.5/2 do. Other models will create something based on text prompt.
and
Three Spidermen Pointing Meme
Generated by KREA2 Turbo:
you may ask "So what?", emm how to explain.. it is exactly the memes not their version drawn using model than unaware of it. Like see spider-man-triple-meme-template and spiderman-pointing-at-spiderman-template the original meme series templates are:
now when I share what impressed me the most for the first day of usewe can proceed with Intro and all the usual article things.
Intro
KREA 2 Turbo and KREA 2 Raw is open (not very, but still... will check license later) models from KREA. It is available (since Jun 22, 22026) as download for local generation on Huggingface. Raw version is suppose to be used for training mostly and Turbo for generations.
CivitAi official KREA 2
available for generation are published on May 28, 2026:
KREA 2 Medium - ⚡39 BUZZ (+tips)
KREA 2 Large - ⚡78 BUZZ (+tips)
How it relates to open weighted KREA 2 Raw/Turbo I am not sure yet
Unofficial checkpoints
Used in SD.Next are
CalamitousFelicitousness/Krea-2-Turbo-Diffusers - that was actually used for test
CalamitousFelicitousness/Krea-2-Base-Diffusers (it is Raw)
Some unofficial models on CivitAi are
Model was released with LORAs from KREA on huggingface
https://huggingface.co/collections/krea/krea-2-loras
Image Quality
test v1 2048px
Photorealistic
Taxi window portrait
Hand details
Oslo Opera House (it is correct image, most of the models do not know it)
model also know Obama, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 (will not post here since civitAi not happy with celebrity images so..) You can check it on test v1 2048px page.
Abstract Art
abstract art
gold ans sepia
city theme abstract art
Art styles
ok with abstract art but other art styles is not that good at all so KREA 2:
compare with ERNIE Image Turbo
compare with Nano Banana 2
It is know like 2/10 styles. not much. when it knows it is ok:
But it will be LORAs some day.. right?
test v2 1024 samples
photorealistic
hand and key
hands under the glasses
broken mirror
Illustrative
sociotype (far from ChatGPT 2.0 illustrative quality, but still not bad)
braking the paper wall (it is ok)
gangster duck (I like it)
solar system (again not GPT level, but not bad)
test v3 1024px and 2048px
this one done in both resolution already so we can compare output of 1024px ws 2048 px
photorealistic
2048px
1024px
fairy
2048px
1024px
surreal 2048px
complex concept
pareidolia effect (looks like not able), but at least not put plain faces over the glass.
Resources needed
For local generations I got Intel iGPUs on Intel core ultra 9 185H and 285H with 64 GB and 128 GB of RAM. Both are able to generate with KREA 2. It consumes about 46 GB of "unified" (v)RAM in bfloat16. Just to compare with similar models Z Image Turbo 6B (Total parameters: 10.2B), FLUX.2 Klein 9B (Total parameters: 17.3B), ERNIE Image Turbo 8B (Total parameters: 15.3B), KREA 2 Turbo 13B (Total parameters: 17.1B)
Generation time on Intel core ultra 9 285H iGPU
KREA 2 Turbo (8 step 128x128) generation time is 19 seconds
KREA 2 Turbo (8 step 256x256) generation time is 20 seconds
KREA 2 Turbo (8 step 512x512) generation time is 38 seconds
KREA 2 Turbo (8 step 1024x1024) generation time is 154 seconds
KREA 2 Turbo (8 step 2048x2048) generation time is 738 seconds
ERNIE Image Turbo (8 step 1024x1024) generation time is 95 seconds
Z Image Turbo (9 step 1024x1024) generation time is 85 seconds
FLUX.2 Klein 9B (4 step 1024x1024) generation time is 37 seconds
On real GPUs it will be faster, but the relative speed should remain the same.
Resolution range
1024px and 2048px is definitely work, lets check some other.
128px
256px
512px
1024px
that is good.
Other
Quick compare to ERNIE Image Turbo.
Will generate the illustrations from article https://civitai.red/articles/31633/ernie-image-turbo with KREA2.
Woman subway portrait (not defaulting to Asian)
Chinese prompt generated by ERNIE Built-In prompt enhancer (Asian, that is ok there)
same prompt translated back to English (Caucasian, and that is what you expect), Like you expect wall tiles and station name actually on a station not a subway car.
Fingers. Same two Seeds. Seed 20260619 and Seed 21
both OK.
1920x1200 image is ok it should be negative space on a border and so on.
but some gradients and "stains" are on a background.
1600x400.. Emm ERNIE is kind of better there
Will check if 12 steps will somehow helps with that. not much actually
Lighthouse (still a bit better on ERNIE but not by far)
Artifacts check images
there are some patchy/stains/noise.. hmm
omg, on ribbon it is takes its extreme.
License
https://www.krea.ai/krea-2-licensing you can reading all that, but I just asked Claude to compare with Apache 2.0 (ERNIE Image Turbo) license and get:
Apache 2.0 is a permissive, business-friendly, irrevocable open-source license with virtually no strings attached. Krea 2's license is much more restrictive — it blocks serious commercial players (>$1M revenue), can be revoked at will, requires content policing on your end, and puts all legal risk squarely on you. It's closer in spirit to a "community/non-commercial" license than true open source.
Issues
License is not an Apache 2.0, not critical for personal use, but anyway..
Some patchy-stains-kind-of-artifacts on dark colors.
Seems it is not good with a lot of text.
need LORAs for variety of Art styles, it is not "baked" in model.
Links
test v1
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/KREA+2+Turbo+2048px
compare to
test v2
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/KREA+2+Turbo+test+v2
compare to
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/ERNIE+Image+test+v2+with+Prompt+Enhancer
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/ERNIE+Image+Turbo+test+v2
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/ERNIE+Image+Turbo+test+v2+with+Prompt+Enhancer
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/GPT-Image+1.5+medium+test+v2
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/GPT+Image+2.0+high+test+v2
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/HiDream+O1+Image+test+v2+with+Prompt+Enhancer
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/Seedream+5.0+Lite+test+v2
test v3
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/KREA+2+Turbo+test+v3
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/KREA+2+Turbo+2048px+test+v3
compare to
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/ERNIE+Image+Turbo+test+v3
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/FLUX.2+Klein+base+9B+test+v3
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/HiDream+O1+Image+test+v3
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/Microsoft+Lens+base+test+v3
https://wiki.liutyi.info/display/AI/Microsoft+Lens+Turbo+test+v3
All prompts can be found at