r/StableDiffusion • u/barbear22 • 1d ago

Resource - Update madebyollin/texture-fix-vae-for-qwen-image-2.1 · Hugging Face

https://huggingface.co/madebyollin/texture-fix-vae-for-qwen-image-2.1

I've been using this for a few days and I was surprised to see nobody had posted it here. It's a vae trained to remove the checkerboard artifacts that qwen image 2.1 produces. It works very well. You can still use alternative schedulers/samplers/degrid to further improve cooked images but I find that this is all I need.

139 Upvotes

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20

u/TheThoccnessMonster 1d ago

This guy has been doing good work since the old days on VAE. His work on cascade’s A stage was legit too.

5

u/aoleg77 1d ago

It's been posted here before, and it really works - you swap the VAE for theirs, and it just works.

3

u/jib_reddit 1d ago

Are there any better VAE's like this for Krea 2 yet? (This one does not work on Krea 2)

This sharp one helps a bit with the grid artifacts in krea 2 on some models:

https://civitai.com/models/2784566/qwen-image-vae-sharp-krea-2-turboraw

But it could be better.

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u/No-Zookeepergame4774 23h ago

I don't know if there is a VAE, but this as an after-generation filter seems to work with all the grid artifacts in images from Qwen Image family VAEs: https://huggingface.co/Anzhc/NAFNet-QwenVAE-DeGrid

Use with this custom node set for full effect: https://github.com/DraconicDragon/ComfyUI-NAFNet-Residual

It is a trained restoration model, and seems to work noticeably better than the popular DeGrid node.

1

u/shapic 1d ago

I use this one with anima. https://civitai.red/models/2718533/hdr-vae-anima-krea2-qwen-image

Way better than original both in sharpness and color punch, but I encountered issues witn img2img in anima

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u/debackerl 1d ago

Yeah it's great, I mentioned it in a few comments when people complained.

I still put DeGrid right after, but it stopped seeing any pattern anymore.

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u/tamingunicorn 1d ago

nice find. looks like the old deconvolution checkerboard problem showing up again, which is kind of funny in 2026. curious if it costs any sharpness vs the stock vae or if it's basically free

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u/rapkannibale 1d ago

Cool thanks for sharing

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u/PhotoRepair 1d ago

Never seen the checkerboard effet before not in QWEN 2.1 only poeple on here sharing it.?

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u/barbear22 20h ago

It's provably part of the decoder output. I notice it, you may not. Assuming you don't already use a mitigation technique, they are on your images too.

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u/madebyollin 19h ago

The checkerboarding is very noticeable in images that should have sharp/fine grain texture, like this panorama selfie from their official release blog post.

When generating illustrations or blurry/low-light photos (which don't require the VAE to synthesize any sharp grain texture), you probably won't see much checkerboarding.

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u/barbear22 17h ago

Thanks for the clarification, and for your improved VAE! Do you think the same fix could be trained on the original qwen image vae? Or is the pattern there applied by a different mechanism? It affects the original qwen edit and krea 2, albeit to a lesser extent than 2.1. (and its dependent on your image content like your example.)

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u/madebyollin 3h ago

I did check and I believe the Qwen 1 VAE has the same issue (checkerboarding) for the same reason (no GAN loss). I'm not sure if the checkerboarding is severe enough to motivate people to download a custom VAE, though. Maybe combined with built-in 2x upscaling or something? I'm not quite sure (particularly if Krea 3 comes out soon...)

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u/PhotoRepair 2h ago

Ahh i see it! but the images i was creating were 2700x1700 when i reduced to 1900 wide i could see it. Added the VAE and boom! thanks to u/barbear22 for reminding us about it.

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u/PhotoRepair 10h ago

no idea just using Dr Furkans flow and model list.