We may have a new SOTA open-source model: ERNIE-Image Comparisons

Base model is definitely SOTA, can even easily compete with closed-source ones in terms of aesthetic. Cinematic quality and color grading is next level. Base model is heavily biased on Asian faces, while it excels on anime/illustration style, while my base model anime/illustration experiments wasn’t that good. Higher CFG is slightly better with anime on …

Update: Distilled v1.1 is live

We’ve pushed an LTX-2.3 update today. The Distilled model has been retrained (now v1.1) with improvements to audio quality and a slightly refined visual aesthetic. It’s available on HuggingFace alongside the previous Distilled version. Along with the new checkpoint, we’ve also retrained the distilled LoRA, updated all four ComfyUI example workflows, and refreshed the union …

Free open-source tool to instantly rig and animate your illustrations (also with mesh deform)

If you haven’t seen it yet, a model called see-through dropped last week. It takes a single static anime image and decomposes it into 23 separate layers ready for rigging and animation. It’s a huge deal for anyone who wants a rigged 2D character but doesn’t have hundreds of dollars lying around. The problem is …

After ~400 Z-Image Turbo gens I finally figured out why everyone’s portraits look plastic

Been using Z-Image Turbo pretty heavily since it dropped and wanted to dump some notes here because I kept seeing the same complaints I had on day one and nobody was really answering them properly. The thing I kept running into: every portrait looked like a skincare ad. Glossy skin, symmetrical face, that weird “influencer …

Built a tool for anyone drowning in huge image folders: HybridScorer

Drowning in huge image folders and wasting hours manually sorting keepers from rejects? I built HybridScorer for exactly that pain. It’s a local GPU app that helps score big image sets by prompt match or aesthetic quality, then lets you quickly fix edge cases yourself and export clean selected / rejected folders without touching the …