The text rendering is quite impressive, but is it just me or do all these generated 'realistic' images have a distinctly uncanny feel to it. I can't quite put my finger on it what it is, but they just feel off to me.
The pace of commoditization in image generation is wild. Every 3-4 months the SOTA shifts, and last quarter's breakthrough becomes a commodity API.
What's interesting is that the bottleneck is no longer the model — it's the person directing it. Knowing what to ask for and recognizing when the output is good enough matters more than which model you use. Same pattern we're seeing in code generation.
It's the year of the horse in their zodiac. The (translated) prompt is wild:
"""
A desolate grassland stretches into the distance, its ground dry and cracked. Fine dust is kicked up by vigorous activity, forming a faint grayish-brown mist in the low sky. Mid-ground, eye-level composition: A muscular, robust adult brown horse stands proudly, its forelegs heavily pressing between the shoulder blades and spine of a reclining man. Its hind legs are taut, its neck held high, its mane flying against the wind, its nostrils flared, and its eyes sharp and focused, exuding a primal sense of power. The subdued man is a white male, 30-40 years old, his face covered in dust and sweat, his short, messy dark brown hair plastered to his forehead, his thick beard slightly damp; he wears a badly worn, grey-green medieval-style robe, the fabric torn and stained with mud in several places, a thick hemp rope tied around his waist, and scratched ankle-high leather boots; his body is in a push-up position—his palms are pressed hard against the cracked, dry earth, his knuckles white, the veins in his arms bulging, his legs stretched straight back and taut, his toes digging into the ground, his entire torso trembling slightly from the weight. The background is a range of undulating grey-blue mountains, their outlines stark, their peaks hidden beneath a low-hanging, leaden-grey, cloudy sky. The thick clouds diffuse a soft, diffused light, which pours down naturally from the left front at a 45-degree angle, casting clear and voluminous shadows on the horse's belly, the back of the man's hands, and the cracked ground. The overall color scheme is strictly controlled within the earth tones: the horsehair is warm brown, the robe is a gradient of gray-green-brown, the soil is a mixture of ochre, dry yellow earth, and charcoal gray, the dust is light brownish-gray, and the sky is a transition from matte lead gray to cool gray with a faint glow at the bottom of the clouds. The image has a realistic, high-definition photographic quality, with extremely fine textures—you can see the sweat on the horse's neck, the wear and tear on the robe's warp and weft threads, the skin pores and stubble, the edges of the cracked soil, and the dust particles. The atmosphere is tense, primitive, and full of suffocating tension from a struggle of biological forces.
"""
The complex prompt following ability and editing is seriously impressive here. They don't seem to be much behind OpenAI and Google. Which is backed op by the AI Arena ranking.
I encourage everyone to at least try ComfyUI. It's come a long way in terms of user-friendliness particularly with all of the built-in Templates you can use.
Koboldcpp has built in support for image models. Model search and download, one executable to run, UI, OpenAI API endpoint, llama.cpp endpoint, highly configurable. If you want to get up and running instantly, just pick a kcppt file and open that and it will download everything you need and load it for you.
LMStudio is a low barrier to entry for LLMs, for sure. The lowest. Good software!
Other people gave you the right answer, ComfyUI. I’ll give you the more important why and how…
There is a huge effort of people to do everything but Comfy because of its intimidating barrier. It’s not that bad. Learn it once and be done. You won’t have to keep learning UI of the week endlessly.
The how, go to civitai. Find an image you like, drag and drop it into comfy. If it has a workflow attached, it will show you. Install any missing nodes they used. Click the loaders to point to your models instead of their models. Hit run and get the same or a similar image. You don’t need to know what any of the things do yet.
If for some reason that just does not work for you… Swarm UI, is a front end too comfy. You can change things and it will show you on the comfy side what they’re doing. It’s a gateway drug to learning comfy.
EDIT: most important thing no one will tell you out right… DO NOT FOR ANY REASON try and skip the VENV or miniconda virtual environment when using comfy! You must make a new and clean setup. You will never get the right python, torch, diffusers, driver, on your system install.
Another closed model dressed up as "coming soon" open source. The pattern is obvious: generate hype with a polished demo, lock the weights, then quietly move on. Real open source doesn't need a press release countdown.
That's not what they did with Qwen-Image v1 - they announced it and it was available via API, but then they released the weights a few weeks after with an Apache 2.0 license. Let's at least give them the benefit of the doubt here.
The Chinese vertical typography is sadly a bit off. If punctuation marks are used at all, they should be the characters specifically designed for vertical text, like ︒(U+FE12 PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP).
I've seen many comments describing the "horse riding man" example as extremely bizarre (which it actually is), so I'd like to provide some background context here. The "horse riding man" is a Chinese internet meme originating from an entertainment awards ceremony, when the renowned host Tsai Kang-yong wore an elaborate outfit featuring a horse riding on his back[1]. At the time, he was embroiled in a rumor about his unpublicized homosexual partner, whose name sounded "Ma Qi Ren" which coincidentally translates to "horse riding man" in Mandarin. This incident spread widely across Chinese internet and turned into a meme. So they used "horse riding man" as an example isn't entirely nonsensical, though the image per se is undeniably bizarre and carries an unsettling vibe.
Interesting background! Prompts like this also test the latent space of the image generator - it’s usually the other way round, so if you see a man on top of a horse, you’ve got a less sophisticated embedding feeding the model. In this case, though, that’s quite an image to put out to the interwebs. I looked to see what gender the horse was.
EDIT: After reading the prompt translation, this was more just like a “year of the horse is going to nail white engineers in glorious rendered detail” sort of prompt. I don’t know how SD1.5 would have rendered it, and I think I’ll skip finding out
While I don't doubt this was one influence, there was also an infamous problem with Dall-E 2, which was perfectly able to generate an astronaut riding a horse but completely unable to generate a horse riding an astronaut.
This problem is infamous because it persisted (unlike other early problems, like creating the wrong number of fingers) for much more capable models, and the Qwen Image people are certainly very aware of this difficult test. Even Imagen 4 Ultra, which might be the most advanced pure diffusion model without editing loop, fails at it.
And obviously an astronaut is similar to a man, which connects this benchmark to the Chinese meme.
Fun fact, the Serbian parliament building has two statues of horses riding men in front of it.
Which is really apt because in Serbian "konj", or horse, is a colloquial word for moron. So, horses riding people is a perfect representation of the reality of the Serbian government.
Another fun fact, the parliament building in HL2's City 17 was modelled from that building.
I was curious enough to fact check this. The statue does look like two horses wrestling or even mounting two men, but here’s what the city’s tourism website says about it:
[the famous sculptor Toma Rosandić] named this composition of bronze horses and their tamers “Black horses at play, and with them great heroes”, saying that the horses represent strength, and men tame and control that strength.
From the article it seems the name is 马启仁, not 马骑人 so the guy's name sounds the same as 'horse riding man', but that's not a literal translation of his name.
Very interesting! What's weird though is that the chinese do not even pretend: every single picture has asian-looking people generated.
But on the one picture that honestly looks like a man getting ass-raped by a horse, it's a white man.
I mean even in the west where you can hardly see an ad with a white couple anymore, they don't go that far (at least not yet).
White people are a minority on earth and anti-white racism sure seems to be alive and well (btw my family is of all the colors and we speak three languages at home, so don't even try me).
Super tone-deaf and inappropriate. Not realizing how it would read to the uninformed is a bad look. Myopic at best, openly hostile toward the west along racial lines at worst.
I assumed it was something like that. With all the (impressive) Chinese text in these examples, this definitively wasn't catering to foreign audiences. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it's interesting, it's not something we see a lot.
"""A desolate grassland stretches into the distance, its ground dry and cracked. Fine dust is kicked up by vigorous activity, forming a faint grayish-brown mist in the low sky. Mid-ground, eye-level composition: A muscular, robust adult brown horse stands proudly, its forelegs heavily pressing between the shoulder blades and spine of a reclining man. Its hind legs are taut, its neck held high, its mane flying against the wind, its nostrils flared, and its eyes sharp and focused, exuding a primal sense of power. The subdued man is a white male, 30-40 years old, his face covered in dust and sweat, his short, messy dark brown hair plastered to his forehead, his thick beard slightly damp; he wears a badly worn, grey-green medieval-style robe, the fabric torn and stained with mud in several places, a thick hemp rope tied around his waist, and scratched ankle-high leather boots; his body is in a push-up position—his palms are pressed hard against the cracked, dry earth, his knuckles white, the veins in his arms bulging, his legs stretched straight back and taut, his toes digging into the ground, his entire torso trembling slightly from the weight. The background is a range of undulating grey-blue mountains, their outlines stark, their peaks hidden beneath a low-hanging, leaden-grey, cloudy sky. The thick clouds diffuse a soft, diffused light, which pours down naturally from the left front at a 45-degree angle, casting clear and voluminous shadows on the horse's belly, the back of the man's hands, and the cracked ground. The overall color scheme is strictly controlled within the earth tones: the horsehair is warm brown, the robe is a gradient of gray-green-brown, the soil is a mixture of ochre, dry yellow earth, and charcoal gray, the dust is light brownish-gray, and the sky is a transition from matte lead gray to cool gray with a faint glow at the bottom of the clouds. The image has a realistic, high-definition photographic quality, with extremely fine textures—you can see the sweat on the horse's neck, the wear and tear on the robe's warp and weft threads, the skin pores and stubble, the edges of the cracked soil, and the dust particles. The atmosphere is tense, primitive, and full of suffocating tension from a struggle of biological forces."""
1. I’d wager that given their previous release history, this will be open‑weight within 3-4 weeks.
2. It looks like they’re following suit with other models like Z-Image Turbo (6B parameters) and Flux.2 Klein (9B parameters), aiming to release models that can run on much more modest GPUs. For reference, the original Qwen-Image is a 20B-parameter model.
3. This is a unified model (both image generation and editing), so there’s no need to keep separate Qwen-Image and Qwen-Edit models around.
4. The original Qwen-Image scored the highest among local models for image editing in my GenAI Showdown (6 out of 12 points), and it also ranked very highly for image generation (4 out of 12 points).
Improve the background image clarity and resolution."
I've received an error:
"Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3-Max.
Content Security Warning: The input file data may contain inappropriate content."
I wonder if locally running the model they published in December does have the same censorship in place (i.e. if it's already trained like this), or if they implement the censorship by the Chinese regimen in place for the web service only.
I liked their comic panels example and tried it using their chat at: https://chat.qwen.ai/
When I used the exact prompt the post - the chat works. It gives me the exact output from the blog post.
Then I used Google Translate to understand the prompt format. The prompt is:
A 4x6 panel comic, four lines, six panels per line. Each panel is separated by a white dividing line.
The first row, from left to right:
Panel 1:
Panel 2:
.....
and when I try to change the inputs the comic example fails miserably. It keeps creating random grids - sometimes 4x5 other times 4x6 but then by third row the model will get confused and the output has only 3 panels. Other times English dialogue is replaced with Chinese dialogue. so, not very reliable in my books.
image generation kind of reminds me of video games or any cgi in general.. the progress is undeniable, and yet with every milestone it seems the last gap to "photorealism" is infinitely wide
46 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] threadWhat's interesting is that the bottleneck is no longer the model — it's the person directing it. Knowing what to ask for and recognizing when the output is good enough matters more than which model you use. Same pattern we're seeing in code generation.
What the actual fuck
""" A desolate grassland stretches into the distance, its ground dry and cracked. Fine dust is kicked up by vigorous activity, forming a faint grayish-brown mist in the low sky. Mid-ground, eye-level composition: A muscular, robust adult brown horse stands proudly, its forelegs heavily pressing between the shoulder blades and spine of a reclining man. Its hind legs are taut, its neck held high, its mane flying against the wind, its nostrils flared, and its eyes sharp and focused, exuding a primal sense of power. The subdued man is a white male, 30-40 years old, his face covered in dust and sweat, his short, messy dark brown hair plastered to his forehead, his thick beard slightly damp; he wears a badly worn, grey-green medieval-style robe, the fabric torn and stained with mud in several places, a thick hemp rope tied around his waist, and scratched ankle-high leather boots; his body is in a push-up position—his palms are pressed hard against the cracked, dry earth, his knuckles white, the veins in his arms bulging, his legs stretched straight back and taut, his toes digging into the ground, his entire torso trembling slightly from the weight. The background is a range of undulating grey-blue mountains, their outlines stark, their peaks hidden beneath a low-hanging, leaden-grey, cloudy sky. The thick clouds diffuse a soft, diffused light, which pours down naturally from the left front at a 45-degree angle, casting clear and voluminous shadows on the horse's belly, the back of the man's hands, and the cracked ground. The overall color scheme is strictly controlled within the earth tones: the horsehair is warm brown, the robe is a gradient of gray-green-brown, the soil is a mixture of ochre, dry yellow earth, and charcoal gray, the dust is light brownish-gray, and the sky is a transition from matte lead gray to cool gray with a faint glow at the bottom of the clouds. The image has a realistic, high-definition photographic quality, with extremely fine textures—you can see the sweat on the horse's neck, the wear and tear on the robe's warp and weft threads, the skin pores and stubble, the edges of the cracked soil, and the dust particles. The atmosphere is tense, primitive, and full of suffocating tension from a struggle of biological forces. """
LinkedIn is filled with them now.
What Linux tools are you guys using for image generation models like Qwen's diffusion models, since LMStudio only supports text gen.
Engine:
* https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp/releases/latest/
Kcppt files:
* https://huggingface.co/koboldcpp/kcppt/tree/main
Other people gave you the right answer, ComfyUI. I’ll give you the more important why and how…
There is a huge effort of people to do everything but Comfy because of its intimidating barrier. It’s not that bad. Learn it once and be done. You won’t have to keep learning UI of the week endlessly.
The how, go to civitai. Find an image you like, drag and drop it into comfy. If it has a workflow attached, it will show you. Install any missing nodes they used. Click the loaders to point to your models instead of their models. Hit run and get the same or a similar image. You don’t need to know what any of the things do yet.
If for some reason that just does not work for you… Swarm UI, is a front end too comfy. You can change things and it will show you on the comfy side what they’re doing. It’s a gateway drug to learning comfy.
EDIT: most important thing no one will tell you out right… DO NOT FOR ANY REASON try and skip the VENV or miniconda virtual environment when using comfy! You must make a new and clean setup. You will never get the right python, torch, diffusers, driver, on your system install.
[1] The photo of the outfit: https://share.google/mHJbchlsTNJ771yBa
EDIT: After reading the prompt translation, this was more just like a “year of the horse is going to nail white engineers in glorious rendered detail” sort of prompt. I don’t know how SD1.5 would have rendered it, and I think I’ll skip finding out
This problem is infamous because it persisted (unlike other early problems, like creating the wrong number of fingers) for much more capable models, and the Qwen Image people are certainly very aware of this difficult test. Even Imagen 4 Ultra, which might be the most advanced pure diffusion model without editing loop, fails at it.
And obviously an astronaut is similar to a man, which connects this benchmark to the Chinese meme.
Which is really apt because in Serbian "konj", or horse, is a colloquial word for moron. So, horses riding people is a perfect representation of the reality of the Serbian government.
Another fun fact, the parliament building in HL2's City 17 was modelled from that building.
[the famous sculptor Toma Rosandić] named this composition of bronze horses and their tamers “Black horses at play, and with them great heroes”, saying that the horses represent strength, and men tame and control that strength.
From the article it seems the name is 马启仁, not 马骑人 so the guy's name sounds the same as 'horse riding man', but that's not a literal translation of his name.
But on the one picture that honestly looks like a man getting ass-raped by a horse, it's a white man.
I mean even in the west where you can hardly see an ad with a white couple anymore, they don't go that far (at least not yet).
White people are a minority on earth and anti-white racism sure seems to be alive and well (btw my family is of all the colors and we speak three languages at home, so don't even try me).
"""A desolate grassland stretches into the distance, its ground dry and cracked. Fine dust is kicked up by vigorous activity, forming a faint grayish-brown mist in the low sky. Mid-ground, eye-level composition: A muscular, robust adult brown horse stands proudly, its forelegs heavily pressing between the shoulder blades and spine of a reclining man. Its hind legs are taut, its neck held high, its mane flying against the wind, its nostrils flared, and its eyes sharp and focused, exuding a primal sense of power. The subdued man is a white male, 30-40 years old, his face covered in dust and sweat, his short, messy dark brown hair plastered to his forehead, his thick beard slightly damp; he wears a badly worn, grey-green medieval-style robe, the fabric torn and stained with mud in several places, a thick hemp rope tied around his waist, and scratched ankle-high leather boots; his body is in a push-up position—his palms are pressed hard against the cracked, dry earth, his knuckles white, the veins in his arms bulging, his legs stretched straight back and taut, his toes digging into the ground, his entire torso trembling slightly from the weight. The background is a range of undulating grey-blue mountains, their outlines stark, their peaks hidden beneath a low-hanging, leaden-grey, cloudy sky. The thick clouds diffuse a soft, diffused light, which pours down naturally from the left front at a 45-degree angle, casting clear and voluminous shadows on the horse's belly, the back of the man's hands, and the cracked ground. The overall color scheme is strictly controlled within the earth tones: the horsehair is warm brown, the robe is a gradient of gray-green-brown, the soil is a mixture of ochre, dry yellow earth, and charcoal gray, the dust is light brownish-gray, and the sky is a transition from matte lead gray to cool gray with a faint glow at the bottom of the clouds. The image has a realistic, high-definition photographic quality, with extremely fine textures—you can see the sweat on the horse's neck, the wear and tear on the robe's warp and weft threads, the skin pores and stubble, the edges of the cracked soil, and the dust particles. The atmosphere is tense, primitive, and full of suffocating tension from a struggle of biological forces."""
1. I’d wager that given their previous release history, this will be open‑weight within 3-4 weeks.
2. It looks like they’re following suit with other models like Z-Image Turbo (6B parameters) and Flux.2 Klein (9B parameters), aiming to release models that can run on much more modest GPUs. For reference, the original Qwen-Image is a 20B-parameter model.
3. This is a unified model (both image generation and editing), so there’s no need to keep separate Qwen-Image and Qwen-Edit models around.
4. The original Qwen-Image scored the highest among local models for image editing in my GenAI Showdown (6 out of 12 points), and it also ranked very highly for image generation (4 out of 12 points).
Generative Comparisons of Local Models:
https://genai-showdown.specr.net/?models=fd,hd,kd,qi,f2d,zt
Editing Comparison of Local Models:
https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing?models=kxd,og...
I'll probably be waiting until the local version drops before adding Qwen-Image-2 to the site.
"Analyze this webpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
Generate an infographic with all the data about the main event timeline and estimated number of victims.
The background image should be this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#/media/File :Tank_Man_(Tiananmen_Square_protester).jpg
Improve the background image clarity and resolution."
I've received an error:
"Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3-Max. Content Security Warning: The input file data may contain inappropriate content."
I wonder if locally running the model they published in December does have the same censorship in place (i.e. if it's already trained like this), or if they implement the censorship by the Chinese regimen in place for the web service only.
When I used the exact prompt the post - the chat works. It gives me the exact output from the blog post.
Then I used Google Translate to understand the prompt format. The prompt is: A 4x6 panel comic, four lines, six panels per line. Each panel is separated by a white dividing line.
The first row, from left to right: Panel 1: Panel 2: .....
and when I try to change the inputs the comic example fails miserably. It keeps creating random grids - sometimes 4x5 other times 4x6 but then by third row the model will get confused and the output has only 3 panels. Other times English dialogue is replaced with Chinese dialogue. so, not very reliable in my books.