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Qwen-Image-Edit: Image Editing with Higher Quality and Efficiency

Simon Willison ・ simonwillison.net

Qwen-Image-Edit: Image Editing with Higher Quality and Efficiency. As promised in their August 4th release of the Qwen image generation model, Qwen have now followed it up with a separate model, Qwen-Image-Edit, which can take an image and a prompt and return an edited version of that image.

Ivan Fioravanti upgraded his macOS qwen-image-mps tool (previously) to run the new model via a new edit command. Since it's now on PyPI you can run it directly using uvx like this:

uvx qwen-image-mps edit -i pelicans.jpg \
  -p 'Give the pelicans rainbow colored plumage' -s 10

Be warned... it downloads a 54GB model file (to ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--Qwen--Qwen-Image-Edit) and appears to use all 64GB of my system memory - if you have less than 64GB it likely won't work, and I had to quit almost everything else on my system to give it space to run. A larger machine is almost required to use this.

I fed it this image:

Pelicans on a rock

The following prompt:

Give the pelicans rainbow colored plumage

And told it to use just 10 inference steps - the default is 50, but I didn't want to wait that long.

It still took nearly 25 minutes (on a 64GB M2 MacBook Pro) to produce this result:

Pelicans on a rock now with rainbow feathers - but they look less realistic

To get a feel for how much dropping the inference steps affected things I tried the same prompt with the new "Image Edit" mode of Qwen's chat.qwen.ai, which I believe uses the same model. It gave me a result much faster that looked like this:

The pelicans are now almost identical in realism to the original photo but still have rainbow plumage.