Herbst Photo Style - HerbsPhoto_v4_Flux2 Showcase
HerbstPhoto_v4_Flux2 produces intensely imperfect images that feel candid and alive. The model creates analog micro-textures that break past the plastic look by introducing filmic softness, emulsion bloom & hailation, optical artifacts - such as lens flares, light leaks, chromatic aberration, barrel distortion - and grain that behaves naturally across exposure levels. Compositions are moody, underexposed, and take form in chiaroscuro light. The contrast curve is aggressively low latitude, embracing clipped highlights and crushed shadows.
Version 4 is trained for Flux 2 Dev from Black Forest Labs because I beleive it’s the best image diffusion model, however it’s heavy and can take several minutes to generate a single high-res image, so I will also be releasing an updated version for Z-image, Flux 1 Dev, and SDXL in the coming weeks for those who are looking to use less compute or create faster.
Best Practices for v4:
Prompts: Include “HerbstPhoto” in the prompt. Though the Flux 2 Model can handle prompts that are long and complex, thanks to its incorporation of the mistral_3_small_fp8 text encoder from Mistral AI , I tuned this LoRA to produce dramatic effects even with simple language writing that does not include style, texture, and lighting tokens.
LoRA strength: 0.4 - 0.75. (0.73 sweet spot) 0.8-1.0 for less prompt adherence and max image texture/degradation.
Resolution: 2048x1152 (26x9) or 2488x2048, though the model also produces good results across aspect ratios and sizes up to 2k.
Schedulers and Samplers: I tested every combination of scheduler and sampler for Flux 2 and can recommend a handful of combinations:
dpmpp_2s_a + sgm_uniform
er_sde + ddim_uniform
dpmpp_sde + simple
dpmpp_3m_sde_gpu + simple
Ipndm + simple
dpmpp_sde + ddim_uni
Training Process Overview:
I used AI Toolkit from Ostris, LLC on an H200 GPU cluster from Runpod to train over 100 versions of the model, all using the same 42-image dataset + simple captions. For each run, I changed one parameter to get a clean A/B tests and figure out what actually moves the needle. I’ll share the full research soon :) After lots of testing, I am happy to finally release HerbstPhoto_v4_Flux2.