I'm working on a small AI Discord Community you can join here: https://discord.gg/ehhMrD4PQT

My Very First VAE Merge, which is found in one of my models on my old account. Feel free to test and/or use them. V3 is what I originally wanted the VAE to be, a VAE that adds subtle contrast/saturation/brightness.

VAEs may effect images a bit too much for you personally, especially if you're doing hires/upscale/etc with IMG2IMG, but if you like the those images go for it. Works best for TXT2IMG. I personally like the VAEs for TXT2IMG mainly, and IM2IMG if the image is washed.

Also VAE has a tendency to fix some minor background stuff sometimes, due to it properly doing that artifact/noise in that spot. Finetuned VAE basically has slightly different lighting contrast is pretty similar.

Finetune V2.0 settings from the script vibe-coded by Claude Sonnet 4.5 that I used:

- GPU: RTX 3060 12GB
- VAE Used: The Base Crystal VAE Merge on this page
- Dataset Total: 251 images (Overkill but Good for Variety)
- Resolution: 1024x1024
- Batch size: 2
- Epochs: 5 - Ended up choosing epoch 1 on testing, due to PC shutting off at epoch 3/5)
- Learning rate: 5e-6 (0.000005)
- Training mode: Decoder-only
- Optimizer: AdamW
- Loss: MSE reconstruction

Note: Still doesn't do well in hires only for dark lighting images.

All Finetune V2.5 settings:

- GPU: RTX 3060 12GB
- VAE Used: The Base Crystal VAE Merge on this page
- Dataset Total: 55 images
- Resolution: 1024x1024
- Batch size: 1
- Epochs: 1
- Learning rate: 1e-5 (0.00001)
- Training mode: Decoder-only
- Optimizer: AdamW

Note: Was gonna make a SD1.5 version but decided not to since they'd be extremely similar.

Re-Categorized due to tool due to me wondering what the Google AI overview thought was a asset.

This is what the AI Overview thought is a asset:

This is what the AI Overview thought is a tool:

Crystal - VAE [SDXL/Illustrious] - VAE V2