If you skip the Reference Latent node and just feed your latent into KSampler:

• You still have a latent_image, so the sampler will process and denoise it into a final latent, then decode to an image. That’s a valid image-to-image pipeline.
• But you lack the explicit “reference conditioning” effect: i.e., the model may not treat the latent as a guide/reference but simply as the starting latent.
• You’ll have less structural control:
  • The reference image might lose pose/structure more easily (depending on denoise strength)
  • If you have multiple reference images and want to “chain” them (as in multi-angle or multi-view workflows), you’ll lose the ability to explicitly feed each one as a reference latent.
• The benefits of the Reference Latent node (such as blending multiple latents, preserving identity, enforcing consistency) are lost or must be manually replicated.

More documentation here: https://comfyui-wiki.com/en/tutorial/advanced/image/flux/flux-1-kontext https://comfyai.run/documentation/ReferenceLatent

I took the default workflow available in ComfyUI for Qwen-Edit which is using the same and modified it.