QWEN Image Edit 2511 Released! - Open-source Nano Banana Alternative | ComfyUI Guide
YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/1K8aemA8szE
Hello everyone! Merry Christmas and happy early New Year to all who celebrate! Wishing everyone the very best this new year!
The brand new Qwen Image Edit 2511 model just dropped and, like it's predecessor QIE 2509, is a mostly great alternative to Nano Banana 2 or Seedream 4.5. I will say though, like 2509, many of the same issues and downsides relative to NB2 and Seedream 4.5 remain: poor skin and finicky manual set up, though the model overall is pretty good.
Getting Started
To get started with Qwen Image Edit 2511, you'll need to have ComfyUI installed and updated to the newest version. To update:
1.) Click the "Manager" button in the top right of your ComfyUI interface, and select "Update All".
2.) Once the update has completed, return to the manager and select "Restart". Wait for ComfyUI to reboot, and refresh your page. You should now be ready to go!
Next, download the workflow JSON file from the bottom of this post and drag and drop it into ComfyUI. If you have any missing nodes, return to the "Manager" in the top right and select "Install Missing Custom Nodes". Select all that populate, install them, restart ComfyUI, and reload the workflow.
Finally, you'll need to install the correct models. If you're using GGUF models, make sure you replace the "Load Diffusion Model" node with a GGUF Loader node.
Main Diffusion Model (/models/diffusion_models): https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511-GGUF/blob/main/qwen-image-edit-2511-BF16.gguf
GGUF Variants (/models/diffusion_models): https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511-GGUF/tree/main
Text Encoder (/models/text_encoders): https://huggingface.co/Comfy-Org/HunyuanVideo_1.5_repackaged/resolve/main/split_files/text_encoders/qwen_2.5_vl_7b_fp8_scaled.safetensors
VAE (/models/vae): https://huggingface.co/Comfy-Org/Qwen-Image_ComfyUI/resolve/main/split_files/vae/qwen_image_vae.safetensors
Lightning 4-Step Lora (/models/loras): https://huggingface.co/lightx2v/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511-Lightning/blob/main/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511-Lightning-4steps-V1.0-bf16.safetensors
Once installed, return to ComfyUI and hit "R" on your keyboard to refresh the node definitions. Now all your models should be loaded!
If you have a lower VRAM computer and cannot run the full 30+ GIG BF16 model, feel free to use the GGUF models. Select the model based on your computers VRAM. If you have 12gb of VRAM, select a model that has a size ~12gb.
My Thoughts
Overall, it's a warm welcome, but from my limited testing so far, a bit of a disappointing one. I think Nano Banana 2/Pro sets a really high bar unfortunately, and I was hoping to see the new QIE model significantly outperform 2509 specifically in skin and consistent characters, but a lot of the core issues I saw with the 2509 model still remain. Skin is slightly better, but still has that Qwen look, and while character consistency mostly works quite well, as I noticed with the 2509 model, eye color and detail is still a struggle, while Nano Banana Pro handles it with ease.
That being said, for users on a budget, it's definitely a great tool to have in your arsenal, and seems like an upgrade against 2509, though maybe not as major as we would've hoped. Overall, I think there's a lot that remains to be seen and tested with this model, and now that the community has it's hands on it, we can see some cool stuff in 2026.
We do plan to create a variation of our Lora Dataset Creator workflows for our paid members using Qwen Image Edit 2511 as a free alternative to the process we proposed using Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.5
What do you guys think of the model? Any strengths or strategies you've seen that I might have missed?
Resources:
Main HuggingFace Model Repo: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511
ComfyUI QIE 2511 Blog: https://docs.comfy.org/tutorials/image/qwen/qwen-image-edit-2511