Image generation

The Images tab drives stable-diffusion.cpp models as a thread: every prompt adds a turn, and you can keep editing the last image or start a New thread for a fresh subject.

API mode picks the route. SDAPI exposes the full control set below and can edit a previous image; OpenAI (/v1/images/generations) only ever generates fresh - it has no edit loop.

Framing: choose an aspect (1:1 through 9:16) and a size (the long edge; the short edge snaps to a multiple of 64). Sizes above what a model handles are greyed out.

Controls (SDAPI): steps, CFG, seed (-1 = random; a pinned seed reproduces the first image of a batch and increments from there), batch (up to 8, rendered one after another), tweak strength (how far a follow-up may stray from the previous image), sampler, scheduler, and an optional negative prompt. Switching models loads that model's known-good defaults, shown under the fields. Two toggles: Tone anchor pins reused-source brightness to the thread's first image so chained edits don't drift, and Keep resolution edits at the source image's native size.

LoRAs: adapters sitting next to the model file, listed on demand via Load list (which loads the model), each with its own strength.

Editing an image:

• Reply on any image reuses it as the source for the next prompt.
• Reference images (Kontext / Qwen-Image-Edit class): attach one or more images the model conditions on while the prompt drives the edit. For a style transfer, attach the style image last and say so in the prompt ("apply the artistic style, color palette and brushwork of the final reference image to the other image").
• Inpainting: the brush button opens the mask editor - paint the area to change with a brush or lasso, and with a segmentation model configured you can also select by box, by point, or by text ("the sky"). Only the masked region is redrawn.

Queueing prompts: you don't have to wait for a render to finish. Type the next prompt and press Enter and it is queued, shown as a chip above the composer; it starts the moment the current one ends. Every setting stays editable while a generation runs, because a queued prompt captures the settings as they were when you queued it - size, steps, CFG, seed, sampler, LoRAs, even the model - so you can retune the panel for the next idea without changing what is already waiting. The chip shows the size/steps/CFG it will use. Removing a chip drops that prompt; Stop cancels the running render and leaves the rest of the queue alone. A follow-up queued with no attachment or mask edits the image the running render is about to produce, not the one on screen when you typed it.

While a generation runs you get the live phase (encoding, prompt, sampling, decoding), step count, ETA and elapsed time. Each finished image has actions for regenerate, edit the prompt, copy, download, and upscale x4 - see the Upscaling article.

Tips: turbo/lightning/distilled checkpoints usually need CFG = 1.0 - a higher CFG makes them blurry or burnt. SDXL/SD models need a full checkpoint (they can't be split-loaded from separate UNet + text-encoder files).

This page is generated from the help wiki that ships inside the app: the same text you get from the Help button, and the same text the playground assistant searches. Corrections go to wiki_articles.json.