Krea 3 · Text to Image

Krea 3, without any weights involved

Krea's newest image model, called from ComfyUI as a node instead of downloaded. There's no checkpoint, no text encoder, no VAE - the graph sends your prompt to PopNow's API and hands back an IMAGE like any local sampler would. Which is the whole point of that side of the ecosystem: some models you simply can't have, so the node is the door.

The pitch for Krea 3 specifically is a planning pass. Krea's own framing is that Krea 3 reasons about the picture before drawing it, and two widgets here expose that: enable_thinking, and a quality switch between High quality and Fast. The docs are blunt that neither changes the price - you're buying time or buying refinement, and the meter runs the same.

If you came from Krea 2, one thing to unlearn: the open Krea 2 weights got an alignment pass the hosted API version never received, and people noticed the collateral damage - flattened expressions, prompt clauses about bodies quietly dropped. The hosted family is the other way round. That doesn't mean Krea 3 won't refuse you; the company has said on the record it ships filters, so expect the odd content_rejected. Failed runs are refunded, which takes some of the sting out of a refusal on a 4-cent image.

What the knobs do

The schema here is short, and that's a feature - nothing to misconfigure.

• prompt - plain sentences. Not danbooru tags. Krea models respond to a described scene, and thin prompts get thin images.
• enable_thinking - default off. On, it spends longer planning before it draws. Same price, more wall-clock. I'd leave it off for the first pass and only flip it when a composition keeps coming back wrong.
• quality - High quality (default) versus Fast. "Fast returns sooner, same price," per the tooltip. There's no cheaper tier, so this is purely a latency decision.
• negative_prompt - and be careful here, because the tooltip says it's used by the high-quality variant only. Set it while quality is on Fast and you've written a paragraph into a void.
• aspect_ratio - 1:1 default, up to 21:9 for the wide stuff. Ten presets; no free-form width/height.
• output_format - png or jpeg. PNG if it's going anywhere near another pass.
• seed - ships fixed, so re-queueing an identical graph reuses the first result instead of charging you again. Flip control-after-generate to randomize for a fresh take per run.

Outputs: images (one IMAGE) and task id, an opaque string that identifies the job in PopNow's API console - useful when a run does something weird and you want support to look at the exact request.

Installing it

Manager > Custom Nodes Manager, search PopNow, Install, restart. Or, if you prefer your own hands:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/popnow-ai/popnow-comfyui

comfy node install popnow-comfyui does the same through the Comfy CLI. There is nothing else to install - no requirements file, no model downloads, no PyAV build. The pack's own pyproject.toml lists zero dependencies because it only uses what ComfyUI already ships.

Then the key: create one at popnow.ai/api/console/keys, open Settings > PopNow, paste, restart. Setting POPNOW_API_KEY=sk-popnow-... in the environment takes precedence and is what you want on a headless box. The key lands in user/popnow/config.json under your ComfyUI user folder - never in the workflow file, never in PNG metadata, so you can share graphs without leaking it.

Practical notes

Krea 3 is priced per image at roughly three and a half cents, and the extras compound: every source image you add on the Edit side raises the quote, and there's no free preview tier. Run a couple of cheap explorations before you commit to a batch. Settings > PopNow > Max credits per run puts a hard ceiling on any single node run if you don't trust your own clicking.

If the node disappears from the menu, restart ComfyUI - the whole node list is rebuilt from your account's catalog on startup, so a model that exists on popnow.ai but not in your menu usually means the catalog hasn't been fetched yet. And an error ending in request_id ... is the most useful thing you can send support, so don't clear the console.