Krea 2 AI Image Generator: Variants, Style References, and Pricing (2026)
Last updated August 7, 2026
Krea 2 (May 2026) is Krea AI's first from-scratch foundation image model, built to escape the generic "AI look" via aesthetics and style transfer. It ships as v2 Large (photoreal, ~$0.06/image) and v2 Medium (fast illustration, ~$0.03), supports up to 10 weighted style references including negative weights, and has open-weights siblings K2 Raw and K2 Turbo. Both variants run inside the invideo agent.
Updated August 2026
Krea 2 — launched May 12, 2026, the company's first foundation image model built entirely from scratch — is a bet that taste beats scale: it competes on aesthetics, style transfer, and creative control, not on out-benchmarking the frontier labs at everything. That bet shapes every choice below, from the undisclosed parameter count to the style-reference system. It ships in two API variants, Krea v2 Large (photoreal detail and raw looks) and Krea v2 Medium (fast, expressive illustration and anime at roughly half the cost), and both are available inside the invideo agent's image-model picker. In June 2026 Krea also open-sourced two checkpoints from the same line, K2 Raw and K2 Turbo.
What is Krea 2, and why does it look different?
Krea built its earlier tools on other labs' models — including the open-weights FLUX.1 Krea collaboration with Black Forest Labs (July 2025). Krea 2 is the break from that: an in-house diffusion transformer trained, in the company's words, to be "focused on aesthetics, style transfer, and creative control" (Introducing Krea 2, May 2026). The explicit design goal was to escape the recognizable "AI look" — the over-smooth, over-lit sameness — in favor of a wide aesthetic range Krea describes as spanning "the grainiest film photography to the cleanest studio shot."
The bet appears to have paid off on style specifically: Krea's style-transfer benchmark post (May 12, 2026) reports Krea 2 landing within 0.14 points of GPT Image 2 on Style Fidelity in the Contra Labs benchmark, and the June 23, 2026 technical report places it top-10 on the Artificial Analysis text-to-image leaderboard — "2nd place among models from independent labs," per Krea.
Krea 2 specs (August 2026)
| Spec | Detail (as of August 2026) |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Diffusion Transformer (DiT); GQA with gated sigmoid attention, SwiGLU MLPs, 3D axial RoPE |
| Text encoder | Qwen 3 VL, multilayer feature aggregation |
| Training | Progressive resolution 256 → 512 → 1024 px; pretrain → SFT → preference optimization ("STPO") → RL → distillation |
| Parameter count | Not disclosed |
| Aspect ratios | 1:1 through 2.35:1 |
| Controls | Style references, creativity levels (raw/low/medium/high), seed control |
| Open weights | K2 Raw (undistilled base) and K2 Turbo (few-step distilled), released June 23, 2026 |
| Launched | May 12, 2026; Krea 2 Turbo June 3, 2026 |
The most telling row is the one Krea left blank: no parameter count. The disclosure budget went to the training recipe instead — progressive resolution, preference optimization, RL — which is exactly where you'd invest if the product is a look rather than a size.
Sources: Krea 2 technical report, Krea 2 Turbo announcement.
Krea v2 Large vs Krea v2 Medium: which variant should you pick?
The two API variants split cleanly by job, and the invideo picker mirrors the same split:
| Variant | Best at | Speed and cost profile |
|---|---|---|
| Krea v2 Large | Photorealistic detail, "raw" film-like looks | Slower, roughly $0.06 per image via third-party API hosts |
| Krea v2 Medium | Fast, expressive illustration and anime | Around $0.03 per image — about half the Large rate |
| K2 Turbo (open weights) | Few-step speed; Krea claims "high-quality images in just 2 seconds" | Self-hosted; permissive license |
| K2 Raw (open weights) | Fine-tuning base, undistilled | Self-hosted; permissive license |
Rule of thumb: product shots, portraits, and anything that has to read as a photograph → Large. Stylized art, anime, illustration-heavy thumbnails, or high-volume drafting → Medium. Note the per-image prices above come from third-party API listings, not an official Krea rate card, so treat them as approximate as of August 2026.
How does Krea 2's style-reference system work?
This is Krea 2's most unusual feature. Per the May 21, 2026 deep-dive, you can attach up to 10 style reference images to a single generation, each with its own adjustable weight — including negative weights, which push the output away from a reference's aesthetic. No other mainstream image model documents negative style weighting. Combined with moodboards and a preset style catalog, it turns style control from a prompt-wording problem into a dial-turning one.
Documented strengths and weaknesses
Strengths. Style fidelity and style transfer are the headline, backed by the Contra Labs numbers above. Aesthetic range and photorealism (in the Large variant) are the other two pillars Krea claims in the launch post, and the top-10 Artificial Analysis placement (June 2026) supports the general-quality claim.
Weaknesses. Third-party API documentation notes Krea 2 "may have difficulty rendering legible text within scenes, intricate UI layouts, or pixel-perfect branding." That caveat comes from reseller docs rather than Krea itself, so weigh it accordingly — but it matches the model's positioning: aesthetics, not typography.
What should you use Krea 2 for?
- Stylized art and illustration — Medium's home turf; a natural fit when you're working in an AI art generator workflow and want a consistent hand-drawn or anime look across a series.
- Photoreal hero images — Large's raw, film-like output suits product photography scenes where the generic AI sheen would undercut the shot.
- Brand-consistent visuals at volume — the style-reference system makes Krea 2 a strong engine behind an AI design generator pipeline: lock a moodboard once, generate everything on-style after that.
Prompting Krea 2: what actually works
- Let references carry the style, let the prompt carry the content. With up to 10 weighted references available, keep prompts about subject, composition, and lighting — "35mm photo of a ceramicist at a wheel, window light, shallow depth of field" — and load the aesthetic into references.
- Use negative weights instead of negative prompts for aesthetics: down-weight a reference embodying the look you're avoiding.
- Match creativity level to variant: "raw" or "low" on Large for photorealism; higher creativity on Medium for expressive illustration.
- Keep in-image text minimal and plan to add typography downstream, given the documented text-rendering caveat.
Krea 2 questions, answered
Can I use Krea 2 images commercially?
For API-generated images, commercial rights are governed by the hosting platform's terms, which defer to the model provider's license. The open-weights K2 Raw and K2 Turbo checkpoints were released under a permissive license per the June 2026 technical report — check the Hugging Face model card for exact terms before shipping commercial work.
Is Krea 2 open source?
Partially. The flagship v2 Large/Medium API models are closed, but Krea released K2 Raw (undistilled, for fine-tuning) and K2 Turbo (distilled, few-step) as open weights on June 23, 2026.
How much does Krea 2 cost per image?
Krea has not published an official per-image API rate card. Third-party API hosts list roughly $0.03 per image for v2 Medium and about $0.06 for v2 Large as of August 2026; the Krea app itself offers free signup with subscription tiers.
What is Krea 2 Turbo?
A speed-optimized version announced June 3, 2026, which Krea claims delivers "high-quality images in just 2 seconds." Its distilled sibling, K2 Turbo, is the open-weights release.
Is Krea 2 good at rendering text in images?
It's the model's documented soft spot — third-party docs warn about legible in-scene text, UI layouts, and pixel-perfect branding. Treat text-heavy images as a job for a different model.
Where can you run Krea 2?
Both picker variants — Krea v2 Large and Krea v2 Medium — are live inside invideo, the AI video platform that gives serious creatives every major model in one place. Ask the agent for the raw-photo look and it will route to Large; ask for fast stylized frames and Medium's half-price speed does the work — and either can feed stills straight into a video timeline. Krea 2 sits alongside the full image roster on invideo's AI models index, and slots directly into the AI image generator workflow.
Version history: first published August 2026, covering Krea 2 (May 2026), Krea 2 Turbo (June 2026), and the K2 Raw/Turbo open-weights release (June 2026).