SDXL Lightning

Overview

SDXL-Lightning can spit out 1024px images in as little as one step.

It’s basically a stripped-down version of Stable Diffusion XL Base 1.0 made way faster using a trick called Progressive Adversarial Diffusion Distillation. Sounds fancy right? It just means they made it smaller and quicker without killing the image quality.

You get full UNet versions for the best-looking results or smaller LoRA options that play nice with other SDXL tools. And yeah it works with ComfyUI and Hugging Face’s Diffusers.

Speed. This thing pushes out pictures in 1 to 8 steps. Most folks find the sweet spot at 2 to 4 steps where it balances speed and quality just right. You won’t have to sit around waiting.

Quality. It’s up there with SDXL Turbo but runs faster.

Flexibility. Wanna go light or full throttle? Your call. It supports different options depending how picky you are about speed vs detail.

Ease. Demos are ready-made. You can try it out while typing or plug it into your workflow with almost no setup.

You can run it for free on your own machine or use API services like Replicate where each image costs just fractions of a cent.

Released under The Responsible AI License, which lets you use and share the model pretty freely as long as you follow the rules. Those rules block certain uses the creators think aren’t right for the model or could do harm.