Black Forest Labs releases FLUX 3 Image Klein, a 5.6B open image model

Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3 Image Klein on 15 October 2026. The 5.6B-parameter model creates images from text, edits them and combines up to 10 reference images. It shares the core features of the full FLUX 3 Image model: native 4K output, precise edits and bounding boxes that set where elements go or limit an edit to one area.

In the company’s evaluations it ranks first in text-to-image, multi-reference generation and editing, ahead of the larger Qwen-Image 2.1 and the closed Ideogram V4.5 and FLUX.2 [pro]. Against FLUX.2 [klein] 9B, its Elo rating, a score built from head-to-head comparisons, is 91 points higher in text-to-image, with 38% fewer parameters.

The release has a base model for fine-tuning and a step-distilled model, trained to need fewer generation steps, plus FP8, INT8 and NVFP4 builds made with NVIDIA. With the INT8 build it runs on GeForce RTX GPUs with as little as 8GB of memory, through ComfyUI or Diffusers.

The weights use the FLUX Kommunity License, which allows free commercial use for individuals and companies with annual revenue under $5 million; larger organisations need a self-hosted licence or the API. In Black Forest Labs’ API the distilled model is flux-3-image-klein, at $0.009 for a 1K image and $0.036 at 4K.