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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

The models seem to have gotten to a point where even something I can run locally will give decent results in a reasonable time. What is currently "the best" (both from an output quality and ease of installation perspective) setup to just play with local a) image generation, b) image editing?

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If you have a Mac, get "Draw Things": https://drawthings.ai/releases/

It supports all major models and has a native Mac UI, and as far as I can tell there's nothing faster for generation.

The "best" models, and a bunch more, are built-in. The state of the art is FLUX.1, "dev" version for quality, "schnell" version for speed.

SDXL is an older, but still good model, and is faster.

For runtime, I use ComfyUi [0] which is node based and therefore a bit hard to learn. But you can just look at the examples on their github. Foocus [1] also seems to be popular and a bit more conventional perhaps, though I didn't try it.

For models, Flux [2] is pretty good and quite straightforward to use. (In general, you will have a runtime and then you have to get the model weights seperately). Which Flux variant depends on your graphics card, the Flux.1 schnell should work for most decently modern ones. (And the website, civitai.com is a repository for models and other associated tools.)

[0] https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI

[1] https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus

[2] https://civitai.com/models/618692?modelVersionId=699279

EasyDiffusion is almost completely download and run, i'm too lazy to setup comfyui, I just want to do model downloads -> run easy diffusion -> input my prompts into the web UI -> start cooking my poor graphics card

ComfyUI has all the bells and whistles and is node based which is wonderful. In comfyui you can use any of these and more:

Flux has been very popular lately.

Pony is popular especially for adult content.

SDXL is still great as it has lots of folks tweaking it. I chose it to make a comic as it worked well with LoRas trained on my drawings. (article on using it for a comic here https://www.classicepic.com/p/faq-what-are-the-steps-to-make...)

git clone https://github.com/lllyasviel/stable-diffusion-webui-forge.g...

download models and all vae files for the model, put in right place, run batch file, configure correctly and then gen images using browser.

Edit: never mind seems like this recommendation is not the best

A1111 is a good place to start. Very beginner friendly UI. You can lookup some templates on Runpod to get started if you don't have a GPU.

someone else mentioned a local setup which might be even easier

A1111 is EoL.

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