Krea Reference V10 Visual Guide

Quick Start

Same route as V9, two extra wires. Choose Use image for on each card, connect every card to the V10 stack, and wire the two new outputs so the stack can talk back.

What V10 Adds

The Four New Recipes

Each was possible in V9 through manual tuning; V10 ships them as tested one-click bundles.

Suggest The Color Palette

Strength 0.65 Seed 972101 Cap 0.9 Palette wash, zero detail

Prompt: a matte ceramic sphere on a small plinth, neutral gray studio backdrop, soft even light, clean unmarked design, no readable text

Borrow broad color palette, contrast, and tonal relationships - nothing else. Same prompt, same seed: the neutral sphere takes on the source's pastel coral-teal-lavender relationships as soft color fields while the abstract source shapes stay out entirely. The recipe whispers below ~0.5, lands clearly from ~0.6, and caps itself at 0.9.

Use The Background/Setting

Strength 0.65 Seed 972102 Subject stays yours

Prompt: a sculptural table lamp on a small side table, editorial product photo, cohesive interior scene, no readable text

Borrow the feeling of the place: the reference's warm plaster palette and room mood arrive, and the model builds a coherent interior around the prompt's lamp. The reference is studied structure-free, so it sets the atmosphere without ever reshaping your subject into its own forms. Pair it with keep the same subject for product-in-a-place shots.

Copy The Camera Framing

Strength 0.30 Seed 972103 Grayscale, aspect preserved Pairs with early layout only

Prompt: three ceramic vases in a row on a low wooden table, plain unmarked surfaces, soft daylight, refined product photography, no readable text

Camera distance, crop, and viewpoint only - the diagonal row arrangement echoes the reference while subject, palette, and surface come from the prompt. The reference keeps its aspect ratio during study because the frame is the information. Set When this card guides to early layout only so it composes the shot and then gets out of the way.

Mood Board Only

Strength 0.50 Seed 972104 Hard cap 0.9

Prompt: a calm desk scene with a small ceramic lamp and a closed notebook, editorial photo, no readable text

Loose inspiration that stays gentle and never dictates: the sage-and-cream calm of the source settles over the desk without touching the composition. The recipe is capped so a mood board can never take over the image, no matter where the slider goes - the stack report will show the cap if you push past it.

House settings for every demo: krea2 turbo nvfp4, 8 steps, cfg 1.0, euler/simple, AuraFlow shift 3.14, 512×768, fixed seed per demo; stack at artist-friendly feel, medium (384) detail, smart per-card timing, written prompt strength 1.25; negative prompt boring, dull, blurry, low-quality, fake letters, readable text, logo, watermark, oversaturated colours. Every demo was rendered through the real V10 nodes with the current recipe tuning - the embedded workflow values are exactly what rendered. Full per-demo settings: guide-demo-manifest.json.

The Recipe Gallery: Every Job Demonstrated

One demo per built-in recipe - all twelve - on the bundled example assets, so any row is reproducible. Drag any PNG in docs/assets/krea-v10/demos/ into ComfyUI to load its exact workflow.

Per-recipe references, strengths, seeds, and lessons: the gallery table in the Markdown guide and guide-demo-manifest.json.

Create Your Own Recipes

The built-in recipes are settings bundles - and you can write your own. A custom recipe is a small YAML or JSON file; every file that passes validation appears in Use image for as a first-class choice, indistinguishable from a built-in.

label: vintage postcard style
description: Warm faded palette, soft print finish.
role: style
treatment: palette wash
color: 0.9
detail: 0.0
study: "256"
subject: avoid
early: 0.85
late: 0.9
cap: 0.85
shape: 0.75
global: 1.7
layers: [0.25, 0.35, 0.45, 0.6, 0.8,
         1.0, 1.0, 2.5, 5.0, 1.1, 4.0, 1.2]

What each control really does (render-verified)

1. treatment decides WHAT can transfer - the reference is re-drawn before the encoder studies it. Colors only: palette wash (structure-safe: the source's shapes are destroyed, so its subject cannot leak in). Layout: grayscale blur. Silhouette: shape wash. The actual subject: normal. Careful with soft/strong blur alone - the source's forms survive and tend to appear at working strengths; the shipped style and lighting recipes tame strong blur with a cap plus a de-selecting focus - copy their pattern. 2. shape is the volume knob - the one channel that moves pixels on Krea 2 (anchors in the table above). 3. layers fine-tunes WHICH bands are emphasized - second-order polish; it cannot rescue a too-low shape. 4. global does nothing on Krea 2. 5. focus picks ONE aspect by name - "the clothing and garment style, not the person" - written into the encoder's instructions. Render-verified: selecting works, and naming what to skip reliably keeps it out; scene-wide moods (weather) ride the image itself, so save focus for object-bound aspects.

Deriving the layers array

The 12 positions are Krea 2's deepstack bands: 0-4 carry layout and subject structure, 5-6 are neutral, and finish/palette response concentrates at 8 (strongest), 10, then 7. Omit layers to use your role's tuned table. To derive your own: start from the closest family table, scale positions 0-5 by how much structure should arrive and 6-11 by how strongly the finish should, keeping the spike ordering. Each entry lands as clamp(strength × shape × gain, -6, +6) per band, so the gains multiply against shape and shape sets the floor - a 5.0 spike on a shape-0.7 card is loud, the same spike on a shape-0.1 card is a whisper. Family tables, the full chunk map, a copy-paste derivation snippet, a render-validated worked example, and a two-minute render-testing protocol: custom_recipes/README.md.

Custom recipes compose with everything else: direction, timing, and the strength slider apply on top, and the stack report names your recipe on its card line. Design tips and the schema also live in custom_recipes/README.md inside the pack.

Guide Direction: Counter-Examples

Every card gets a job; in V10 it also gets a direction. Away cards steer the result out of a look instead of into one.

The direction journey

Same prompt (a sculptural table lamp in a clean studio product photo, no readable text), same seed (972106); the only change is the style card and its direction. Pulled toward at 0.65, the source's pastel palette takes over the lamp - a rose shade, a sage base, a rounder and softer art direction. Pushed away at 0.40, the same card scrubs in the opposite direction - the lamp comes out plainer and warmer-neutral than even the prompt-only baseline, because the stack is actively steering out of the source's palette and manner.

The style source for both cards is the pastel abstract (slot2_style_reference.png). Away pushes harder per slider unit than toward because it extrapolates past removal - hence step 3 runs at 0.40. example_workflows/krea-v10-counter-example-workflow.json combines both directions: keep a product with a toward card at 0.80 and push a style out with an away card at 0.25.

Per-Card Timing

The text/logo guard clamps last: a guarded card never regains late-phase influence, whatever the timing choice says.

The timing journey

Same style card (suggest the visual style, strength 0.75), same seed (972105), same prompt (a modern table lamp in a clean studio product photo, no readable text) - the only change is When this card guides. Both timings deliver the borrowed palette (color commits in the first sampling steps); what the widget moves is how it lands. Early-only lets the source guide composition and broad color fields, then the prompt's finish passes smooth the surfaces into a classic soft-graded shade. Final-only is the mirror image: the prompt owns the early composition and the source arrives in the detail passes, landing its rose-and-sage palette as a crisp two-tone finish on the prompt's lamp.

Stack Controls: Balance And Reuse

Balance strong cards

Several simultaneously strong cards blend less faithfully than the same cards used separately. Balance budgets the stack's total pull per timing phase and scales hot stacks down together, keeping your relative ratios.

Choice	Use when
off - use my values	Exact V9 behavior. The default.
gentle balance	Four or more active cards, or two or three aggressive ones.
strict balance	Conservative blends where fidelity beats punch.

Reuse image studies

Image studies depend only on the prompt and the prepared images - never on strengths, direction, timing, or balance. With reuse on, tuning re-runs skip every encoder pass; the report's Studies: line shows what was saved.

Choice	Behavior
reuse between runs - faster tuning	Content-keyed cache; edits to images or prompt re-study automatically.
always re-study	Exact V9 behavior. Use while hot-swapping CLIP patches or LoRA hooks.

The Report And The Prepared-References Preview

Card 1 (keep the same subject):
  requested 0.80 -> guiding at 0.70
  after the slider feel curve.
Card 6 (avoid copying text/logos):
  requested 0.50 -> capped at 0.03
  by the text/logo guard.
Studies: 7 encoder passes this run;
  studies cached for faster tuning.

Bundled V10 Workflows

Copy example_assets/krea-reference-examples/ into your ComfyUI input/ folder first so the Load Image nodes find the bundled example images.

The full showcase journey

keep the same subject 0.80 suggest the visual style 0.55 use the background/setting 0.35 suggest the color palette 0.40 copy the camera framing 0.30, early only avoid copying text/logos 0.03

Prompt: a ceramic travel mug on a wooden desk in a bright studio, no readable text at strength 1.15.

The mug is the prompt's, anchored by the content card; the desk, books, and window light read bright-studio; the style and palette cards keep the grade quiet and warm; and no readable markings survive the guard. This render used balance off - the gentle-balance render of the same seed sits in the Balance section above. Drag the result PNG into ComfyUI for the exact graph.

Troubleshooting