About KREA AI

I have to admit, before I started using KREA, I hadn't known how unique it was. KREA may be using Stable Diffusion models, but it's doing some original things with them, and offers a suite of AI tools that work differently from what you've seen in other interfaces.

If you visit KREA.ai and press the "Learn" button, you'll see a set of short video demos that show some of what you can do with KREA video and other tools. Just do that now. It'll be time well spent.

When you start KREA's Realtime Editor, it actually starts you in an img2img (Image-to-Image) mode, instead of the more ordinary Text-to-Image. KREA generates images very quickly, so you can see your image forming as you type a prompt, or as you drag around elements on the left panel. You can upload whatever images you want as reference into the left panel. The all-important "AI Strength" slider is in the top and center, determining how much influence your prompt will have on the image.

KREA does not censor or filter your prompts, so you can generate whatever you want, even when you use it for free. If you want regular Text-to-Image, it can do that too, and it still provides real-time image generation while you type, or whenever you press a button to vary the random seed.

Prompt adherence is typical for Stable Diffusion models. If follows most of your prompt pretty well, but sometimes fails to understand parts of prompts, mis-applies adjectives or colors to unintended parts of the scene, or sometimes seems to ignore some words. Clicking the variation button a few times often shows you enough random variations on your prompt that you can find one you like, however, and it's easy to edit your prompt to get to a look that you like.

The style that KREA adds to prompts works great for cinematic looking images. It's a shame they don't have multiple choices of style while working in HD mode, though, because if you don't like the style that includes soft-focused backgrounds, it's hard to change through prompting alone.

While working on the Free plan, real-time generation gives you images about 512x512 in resolution, varying with Aspect Ratio. A button labelled "Quick Enhance" will add more detail, giving you a resolution of 1024x1024. Quick Enhance causes problems when you are using non-square aspect ratios, though, and for some scenes you'd get better results going straight to the Enhance mode (next section.)

If you switch from the Free plan to one called Basic ($10 per month, when billed monthly) you get a generation model called HD, which does real-time generation at resolutions of about 1024x1024. It seems like an SDXL Lightning model and gives you a great starting point for the Enhance mode, if you need to take your images to even higher resolutions.

A stellar feature of KREA is its Enhance function, which can add resolution and detail to stills or videos. If you give it one of the 1024x1024 images you just generated, it can generate a much more detailed 2048x2048 image for you, even in Free mode. (If you pay for Basic, you'd be able to generate 4096x4096 resolution. But honestly the 2048x2048 resolution is terrific already for most purposes.)

The options and style presets on the Enhance function are very useful. You can turn an image into something that looks like an oil painting, or add vibrance and detail with the digital art preset. You can change the prompt or add a negative prompt just for the Enhance process. (Prompts can describe the image contents, or if you are getting repeat images of your subject in oil painting mode, sometimes prompts work best that just describe the style and environment.) All the Enhance functions make you wait a minute or two, but they are worth it. After working in real-time to get your basic compositions, Enhance is a great tool for refining an image into something really high quality.

KREA also has video generation, which looks a lot like the open-source Steerable Motion. It offered a simple interface letting you use any images you want as keyframes, and letting you add prompts at different frames within your animation. In short, this gives you much more control over the motion in your video than tools like Stable Video Diffusion that are offered as the video option on some websites.

Videos initially were generated as 768x768 resolution, 15 frames per second. Under Settings, I saw that Enhance had written a prompt for the video, based on how it interpreted it. These prompts can be edited, to more accurately describe the intended look of the video. The Enhance mode was able to interpolate it to a smoother 30 fps, and increase the resolution by 1.5x. Even higher resolutions would be available if I subscribed to a higher tier of service. The Enhance process for the video took a long time to complete, understandably much slower than initially generating the video, or any other process I had done in KREA.

The fast generation speed, a flexible interface for putting dynamic objects or real-time painting into img2img, a high-quality Enhance option, and the ability to start using it for free are a terrific combination. KREA is a terrific package that more artists should try spending some time with.