Ultimate Leonardo AI Review: A New Competitor in AI Image Generation
Introduction
Most experienced users agree that Midjourney is the best AI image generator in the game. But what if it had a rival? Leonardo AI has positioned itself as a solid competitor to the gold standard set by Midjourney, offering high-quality generations and unique features not found elsewhere. In this Leonardo AI review, I’ve tested its features and made side-by-side comparisons with other top AI art tools to help you make an informed decision.
What is Leonardo AI?
Leonardo AI is an artificial intelligence-powered art and graphics tool that allows you to generate and upscale images, create animations, and even train your own AI models. It offers tools to create unique, production-quality visual assets, from character design and game assets to marketing materials and architectural drawings. Despite its advanced capabilities, Leonardo remains accessible to all users with its simple user interface, though it has some minor exceptions.
What I Love About Leonardo AI
Image Generation: Leonardo generates high-quality AI images that are competitive with the best out there. Some images are arguably better than those from Midjourney.
Ease of Use: The Leonardo web app is intuitive and visually appealing, making it easy to get started without much hassle.
Customization: The app offers a massive range of settings to tweak your images. Whether you want to use advanced features or keep it simple, Leonardo adapts to your needs.
Versatility: Leonardo excels in generating various styles and types of images, including products, landscapes, anime, cityscapes, abstract, horror, and sci-fi. It also allows for the creation of short animations.
What I Don’t Like About Leonardo AI
Permutation Prompts: As a fan of Midjourney, I miss permutation prompts, a feature I couldn’t find in Leonardo.
Unintuitive Realtime Canvas: While a cool feature, the Realtime Canvas can be unintuitive when refining images to match specific needs.
Occasional Misses: Sometimes, Leonardo misses the mark regarding key phrases and terms used in prompts, which is less of an issue with other tools.
Getting Started with Leonardo AI
After signing up for a free account, you’ll land on the Leonardo app homepage. Here, you can choose from various tools or browse the community creations section for inspiration.
Image Generation
- Type a Prompt: Describe your image in the “Type a prompt” bar and click generate.
- Customize Settings: Use the toolbar to adjust features like the number of images, photorealistic mode, transparency, input dimensions, aspect ratio, guidance scale, and tiling.
Advanced Features
Consistent Characters: Generate consistent characters from a base image in different poses, compositions, and styles.
Realtime Canvas: Paint basic shapes that the AI turns into images in real-time, guided by a text prompt. Though powerful, this feature needs a more intuitive layout.
Canvas Editor: Similar to Realtime Canvas but not in real-time. It’s mainly used for inpainting and has a few more detailed settings.
Motion Tool: Create animations from base images. This tool is simple yet effective and currently excels over competitors like RunwayML’s Gen-2.
Leonardo AI Pricing
Leonardo offers four pricing tiers:
- Free: Basic features with 150 free fast tokens (enough for about 10 to 15 image generations).
- Apprentice: 8,500 fast tokens, private generations, 10 models per month, and 2 concurrent generations.
- Artisan Unlimited: 25,000 fast tokens, unlimited relaxed generations, and everything in the Apprentice plan.
- Maestro Unlimited: 60,000 fast tokens, unlimited relaxed image and video generation, 50 models per month, and 6 concurrent generations.
Final Thoughts
Leonardo AI is one of the best tools on the market for AI image generation, modification, and video creation. It offers unique features like Realtime Canvas and Realtime Generations, setting it apart from competitors. While the image quality can sometimes lag behind other tools, proper tweaking usually results in high-quality outputs. Leonardo AI is a strong competitor to Midjourney and is worth considering for anyone serious about AI-generated art.
Ready to explore Leonardo AI? Visit their official website to get started and see how it can enhance your creative projects.
Feel free to reach out with any questions or share your experiences with Leonardo AI!
