KG Krea 2 Concept Slider Card V11

You want the image brighter, or the person taller, or the plaza emptier. On SDXL the answer used to be a LoRA, or a trained concept slider - a small adapter you train per attribute, per model. That lineage produced about seventeen threads on r/StableDiffusion across two years and never became a daily tool, mostly because "train an adapter before you can turn a knob" is a terrible ergonomic.

The KG Krea 2 Concept Slider Card V11 is the other approach. You name the attribute in plain words, put a number on a dial, and Krea 2's own text encoder builds the axis at encode time. There are no slider weights to download and none to train. The whole node is a dictionary.

What the card actually does

Nothing. Seriously - it costs zero compute. The card's own source calls it "pure description": it packages your settings into a small packet and hands it down the wire. All the model work happens on the other end, in the slider stack, which turns your description into two sentences (a "more" pole and a "less" pole), encodes both, and adds the difference to your conditioning. If that sounds like a hack, it is one - and it's the good kind, because it means any attribute you can describe in words is a valid axis.

Wire it like this:

Load Checkpoint/Krea loaders → Concept Slider Card V11 → Slider 1..8 on Concept Slider Stack V11 → sampler

The single output is slider, type KG_KREA_SLIDER. It only plugs into a slider stack, which is why a card on its own appears to do nothing at all.

The fields a beginner actually sets

Slider value is the dial: -6 to +6 in 0.05 steps, where 0 means the card is skipped entirely and costs no encoder pass. The reliable working band is roughly ±2 to +4; +3 is a normal, clearly visible adjustment and +6 is the deep end where shape and framing start moving. At the default reach, +3 requests a coefficient of 1 and +6 requests 2, so the dial is linear-ish rather than perceptual. Start in the working band.

What this slider changes is the attribute name - brightness, age, fog density, photoreal vs cartoon. It's what the stack derives the automatic pole sentences from, so name it the way you'd describe it out loud to a person. Vague name, vague poles.

What +6 looks like (optional) and What -6 looks like (optional) are the escape hatch, and honestly the best part of the node. Type anything here and it overrides the derived endpoint rather than nudging it. Any describable contrast becomes an axis - style axes work as well as physical ones, because you're just writing the two ends. If a direction refuses to move, this is the first thing to fix.

Slider preset has three options: custom or automatic, person height, plaza crowd. A preset only fills pole text you left empty; it never overrides what you typed. The bundled sentences are literal, straight out of the source - the height preset's positive pole is "a very tall man with long legs, towering height" against "a very short man with a small compact stature, much shorter than average". Note the subject: it describes a man. Use custom poles for anything else. The crowd preset wants a scene with people in it - you can't reduce a crowd that was never there.

When this slider guides picks whole image, early layout only or final details only. Early is composition, final is texture and finish. It's a creative control, not a promise that late influence preserves your structure.

Install

Search Krea Reference in ComfyUI Manager (published by kgilper), or:

cd /path/to/ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/kgilper/krea-reference.git

Restart ComfyUI and refresh the browser. The pack ships no model weights, and requirements.txt says it plainly: no pip dependencies beyond a normal ComfyUI install. What you do need is the rest of Krea 2 - the diffusion model, the Krea Qwen3-VL text encoder and the Qwen image VAE.

Where people get burned

The card is on the advanced/conditioning shelf and quietly needs the Krea Qwen encoder rather than a generic CLIP - the stack will raise a clear error about token-span muting if you hand it the wrong one.

One trap worth knowing now: in manual mode the stack's combined budget is shared, so adding a bright new slider can weaken the one that was working. And a V11 card fed into the older KGKrea2ConceptSliderStackV1 has its preset and timing silently ignored.

Finally, know what you're fighting. Krea 2's open weights went through an alignment pass the hosted model didn't get, and it flattens expressions and drops whole clauses about bodies. An attribute slider can nudge brightness or height all day; ask it to turn "neutral face" into "laughing" and you're pushing against a craters-in-the-model problem that no dial fixes.