SDXL 0.9 seems absolutely amazing so far. It’s so much better at following instructions than any other SD foundation model it’s not even funny, and it can to tons of stuff out-of-the-box that would require at least an embedding with SD1.5. One thing I immediately noticed is that it handles color instructions properly most of the time. You can define tons of object colors, and it’ll usually only color the specified or undefined objects. I also tried things like character in a dirty environment. SD1.5 and its finetunes would often make the character dirty, SDXL follows the instruction properly. Incredible potential.
When it comes to the refiner, I found that the recommended(?) 0.25 strength works well for environments and such, but for characters, it should be dialed way down. I still use it, at around 0.05, and that seems to do the trick. It still does what it’s supposed to at such a low strength, it still has a profound effect on fine detail like hair, but it doesn’t completely change the base generation nearly as much.
Ubiquity stuff is entirely on-premises, their (optional) cloud service is strictly for auth and remote access. Highly recommended, not just for the privacy conscious. Their ecosystem is also relatively affordable (compared to Aruba and Ruckus) and a joy to setup and maintain. No subscriptions or recurring fees.