Krea 2 Style Reference

Krea 2 is the 12B model that took the open ecosystem by storm in mid-2026 - but the version this node talks to is the hosted one, the aesthetic-tuned product Krea actually sells. Its best trick is style transfer: you feed it a reference image and it borrows that image's look - the lighting, the palette, the rendering style - while keeping whatever you prompted. This node is the "borrow the look" part, packaged as a reusable block that snaps into the Krea 2 Image node.

It's a helper node, which confuses people at first: it doesn't output an image at all. It outputs a style_reference wire that carries your image's style instructions into the Krea 2 Image generation node. You won't see anything render until you connect the chain to a generation node.

How it works

Krea's style reference is a simple strength-scaled blend. Give the node an image and a strength, and when the downstream generation runs, Krea uploads your image to its own storage and passes it as a URL with that strength attached. Two details make it more powerful than it looks:

• Negative strength is a real feature. strength runs from -2 to +2, and negative values invert the style influence - useful for "make it look like not this" or for pushing the model away from an unwanted tendency.
• You can chain them. The optional style_reference input lets you stack nodes: style A into style B into style C, up to 10 total references, with the final node's output feeding Krea 2 Image. Each node just appends one more reference to the chain.

The two inputs that matter

• image - the reference whose style you're borrowing. That's the whole job.
• strength - default 1.0. 1.0 copies the look hard; something like 0.3 is a light seasoning; negatives push away from it. Step is 0.05, so it's fine-grained.

Chain the outputs like this: connect each Style Reference node's style_reference output into the next one's input, then take the last one and plug it into the model (style reference) input on a Krea 2 Image node. Krea 2 Image's model picker exposes the style-reference slot, so the wire has somewhere obvious to land. The node validates the 10-reference ceiling and throws an error if you exceed it.

Cost and setup

It ships with ComfyUI core and is free in the sense that this node charges nothing - the credits show up on the generation node it feeds (a style-referenced Krea 2 run costs a couple credits more than a plain one, roughly $0.005–0.035 depending on model tier). Still need a Comfy account with credits for the generation side, and a current ComfyUI. The one gotcha is the storage step: every image you feed it is uploaded to Comfy's API storage, so don't route anything through it you wouldn't upload anyway. It's the difference between "Krea 2 gave me a nice picture" and "Krea 2 gave me a nice picture in exactly the style of that other picture" - and for that specific job, it's the node to reach for.