Hey everyone, Rodney here at Kleebz Tech,
and today we're going to be talking about FreeU in Fooocus. Free what, you ask? Well,
FreeU: Free Lunch and Diffusion U-Net. Yeah, I know, that didn't really explain anything.
Now, this isn't specific to Fooocus only, but I have had a few people ask about the
settings in Fooocus. Where are these settings, you ask? Well, they happen to be hidden in
the debug settings, and I did some research and experimenting to hopefully give you some
information about them. I'm not going to be giving a super detailed explanation, since I don't have
a complete understanding myself, and I couldn't find a lot of detailed information online. But
I will show you some examples of what it can do. Now, the claim is that FreeU can be used to
improve image quality without extra training. As for it automatically improving image quality,
it's hard to say yes or no. I found for some things it did, and others, it did not. But the
biggest thing I discovered is there's no correct setting. I did some digging online, came up with
some recommended settings, and went ahead and tried those out. I would love to go through
every possible setting to show comparisons, but that would be pretty time-consuming, and I
don't think it would really show much. As with many of these things, what looks best
for one person might not for another. So, where do we find the FreeU
settings in Fooocus? Well, you're going to go into the Advanced
tab, and then the Developer/Debug mode, and then you're going to find the FreeU
tab in there. And when you want to use it, make sure you enable it. If you just
move the sliders, it won't do anything. Now, as for what those do: the B value is the
backbone, the S is for the skip connections. So, the B value modifies mostly the core part of
the image, the backbone, and focuses on the main structure of the image, and the S value emphasizes
more on the finer details and the textures. Now, as for which recommended settings to
use, I did some digging online. I found a few different ones from the GitHub page and some
other sources and went with those. For SDXL, and showing some of my examples, you're going to
find a lot of it is all subjective on whether you think those are best or not. For some images,
I found they worked well; for other images, not so well. And I think these two images will
give you an idea. So, in the top left was my initial image, starting with everything set as
one, and then I slowly lowered the S values to get down to the last one. It's pretty noticeable
how it reduces the textures and the details in the image by lowering that S value. Similarly,
with this image, I went the opposite direction, and I left the B values at one and increased
them over that. Now, I haven't found many that suggested doing that, but I wanted to see
what would happen. And as it went through, you can see it added textures and details,
makes the image look pretty bad once you get to a certain point. So, that gives you a little
bit of an idea of what those values might do. Okay, so now, to start to look at the images that
I ran through just for comparison. I won't spend a bunch of time on each one. You can make your
decision, pause it, look at it if you want to. So, the center one is without the FreeU. So for
this one, I actually think that one's better, in my opinion. But again, it really depends
on what you're trying to get out of the image. I've been experimenting with it, and what I
usually do is generate an image and, if I like the image for the most part but want to tweak
it, I'll go into the FreeU settings to try to either increase or lower details. For our mushroom
scene with the giant glowing mushrooms, the same idea applies. Definitely, the center image has
more detail in it and looks more realistic. You can see with some of the other images, the
lower details and textures, and if that's what you're trying to achieve, then adjusting the
FreeU settings might be what you want to do. Now, for our wizard, it's a similar idea. As
with any of these, it really comes down to the style and look. It's almost like a different
style for some of these images on how they come out. Sometimes it actually improves
the image; I personally like the bottom right one myself. This demonstrates
how, sometimes with realistic images, you can end up with oversaturation, especially
on the bottom left or even a little on the top left. Often, it can be just a balance
of slightly adjusting those numbers. For the woman eating a burger, the
same idea. Some of these definitely don't look that realistic. So, if you're
looking for a more photorealistic one, the FreeU disabled on this one, I feel,
is probably better, or even the top right. Now, for our tranquil forest at sunrise, I'm a
big fan of the one without FreeU on this one, but again, that's if I'm going for
more photorealistic. Whereas these other ones definitely have
a different style to them. For our still life of assorted fruits, I think that almost all of the FreeU ones
are better than the original one. So, this example shows that in some images,
it definitely can make a big improvement. The astronaut one here, I'm not seeing much of
a difference between all of them, so overall, I couldn't say whether that would make a difference.
I probably wouldn't mess around with it after trying a few different settings; I'd realize that
maybe I'm not going to get anything different. Our Viking ship, the same idea. The
center one might look more realistic, but I actually like some of the other ones.
So, I think here it demonstrates what you can get for different looks from an
image by adjusting those settings. A lot of people, a lot of stuff I read
online, said that anime was better versus the photorealistic ones, which may be
the case, especially depending on how much detail you want to add or the textures and
things like that. I'm not huge on anime, so I can't really say a lot of comparisons, whether
I think one of these is better than the other. And similar with this one, a lot of these, it's
hard for me to say, you know, you can see the differences, but I don't necessarily know
which is better or not with a lot of these. Now, for this example, I went with a
more photorealistic one. I liked most of the results of these. The bottom
left one here, I'm not a big fan of; I think it looks too fake, but most of the other
ones, I think, actually came out pretty well. So, what's the best way to use FreeU? What I've
been doing is once I generate images, if I want to play around with it and I get an image that's
pretty close to what I want, a lot of times I'll go in, I'll enable FreeU. Now, I want to get the
same image, of course, so I'm going to go in here, uncheck 'random', and I'll set my seed the same.
So, now I have my two images, and I'm going to adjust it on these. At this point, I would
just go ahead, enter in the changes I want, and generate based on that seed, so I can
adjust these to see how it impacts the image. Now, I'm also going to change this down
to just one. I'm just going to go with this first image and have it generate that,
and then I can go ahead and compare them and see if I like the results. If I don't like the
results, then I can continue tweaking further. Now, the one on the left here is the one that
I just adjusted versus the one on the right, and then I can continue adjusting from
there, depending on what I want to do. So that's pretty much how I've been playing
around with it and testing it. The problem is there's no real guaranteed settings, but
I think if you play around with it enough, you get a feeling for what each one will do and
how it may impact the image that you're working on. So, I would suggest keep playing around with
it and discovering what you can do with that. I do plan on using it a few times on images
that came out pretty close to what I wanted, I tweaked it around a little
bit, but I will admit overall, I don't use it a lot yet.
So, we'll see how that goes. I think that covers what I've learned so far with
FreeU and what I wanted to pass along. Hopefully, it gives you an idea of what you can do with it
and maybe start getting better images. Sadly, I don't have all the answers when it
comes to FreeU because I haven't had enough time to really experiment enough
with it. I have not made up my mind on if it makes better images or not. I
think it just makes them different. If you found the video helpful, please
consider hitting the like button, and don't forget, keep on creating.
