The base model you choose determines image quality, style, and what fine-tunes are available.
Major Model Generations
- SD 1.5: Older but massive ecosystem — thousands of LoRAs and fine-tunes. Still widely used.
- SDXL: Significant quality jump — generates 1024x1024 natively. Better anatomy and detail.
- SDXL Turbo / Lightning: 1–4 step generation — extremely fast at some quality cost.
- FLUX.1 (Black Forest Labs): State of the art as of 2024 — best image quality available in open-source. Higher VRAM requirement.
Where to Download
Civitai.com and Hugging Face are the two main model repositories. Always check the license before commercial use.
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