Krea releases Krea 2, its first in-house image model
Krea has launched Krea 2, its first image model trained from scratch, aiming at the generic "AI look" with a style-transfer system that lets users mix and weight visual references.
Krea, best known for its creative tools built on other companies' models, has introduced Krea 2. The company says it is its first foundation image model built entirely from scratch.
Krea argues that most image models handle what goes in an image well, but tend to pull how it looks toward something "polished, safe, and nice." Krea 2 is designed to render a much wider range of styles. The company's examples run from grainy film photography and clean studio shots to cinematic stills, illustration, complex digital painting and experimental work.
Krea says it spent as much effort on a style-transfer system as on the base model itself. Users can pass in reference images, and the model pulls out their style components and applies them to the output. Several references can be combined, and each one's influence can be turned up or down, so a reference can either dominate the result or act as a light direction. A separate control sets how much a batch of images varies, from a cohesive set to a wider spread of palettes and details.
The company describes Krea 2 as the first output of a new research lab. Krea says it has been limited by the third-party models available to it and now wants AI to work as a "raw, flexible, unopinionated" creative medium. A faster variant, Krea 2 Turbo, is also available. Krea says an editing model, Krea 3, will follow in the coming weeks.
The announcement does not give benchmarks, model size, training-data details, pricing or any independent evaluation.