Get rid of the halftone pattern in Qwen Image/Qwen Image Edit with this

I’m not sure if this has been shared here already, but I think I found a temporary solution to the issue with Qwen putting a halftone/dot pattern all over the images.

A kind person has fine tuned the Wan VAE (which is interchangeable with Qwen Image/Qwen Image Edit) and made it so that it doubles the resolution without increasing the inference time at all, which also effectively gets rid of the halftone pattern.

The node to use this fine-tuned VAE is called ComfyUI-VAE-Utils. It works with the provided fine-tuned Wan2.1 VAE 2x imageonly real v1 VAE.

When you use this modified VAE and that custom node, your image resolution doubles, which removes the halftone pattern. This doubling of the resolution also adds a tiny bit more sharpness too, which is welcome in this case since Qwen Image usually produces images that are a bit soft. Since the doubled resolution doesn’t really add new detail, I like to scale back the generated image by a factor of 0.5 with the “Lanczos” algorithm, using the “Upscale Image By” node. This effectively gets rid of all traces of this halftone pattern.

To use this node after installation, replace the “Load VAE” node with the “Load VAE (VAE Utils)” node and pick the fine-tuned Wan VAE from the list. Then also replace the “VAE Decode” node with the “VAE Decode (VAE Utils)” node. Put the “Upscale Image By” node after that node and set method to “Lanczos” and the “scale_by” parameter to 0.5 to bring back the resolution to the one you’ve set in your latent image. You should now get artifact-free images.

Please note that your images won’t match the images created with the traditional Qwen VAE 100% since it’s been fine-tuned and some small details will likely differ a bit, which shouldn’t be a big deal most of the time, if at all.

Hopefully this helps other people that have come across this problem and are bothered by it. The Qwen team should really address this problem at its core in a future update so that we don’t have to rely on such workarounds.