Leonardo

Midjourney still wins, but Leonardo is easier to use, offers a great set of pro tools and is improving all the time

- NIGEL POWELL

Like Midjourney, Leonardo is an established AI image creation platform, having launched in late 2022, and the fact it has survived this long is testament to its quality. Unlike Midjourney, Leonardo offers a free account. This becomes active once you sign in, but it’s easy to switch to the $12 a month Apprentice scheme or the $60 Maestro. The differences cover speed of generation, the number of monthly tokens and how many models you can train every 30 days. The free plan offers 150 tokens’ worth of image generation a day, which is enough for ten to 20 images.

From the hectic front page dashboard you can generate an image from text, doodle something and have AI recreate a fuller version, generate an instant image from your words as you type, and even turn images into video. My advice is to dive into the Realtime Gen menu option, type a few words, and the image will appear as you’re typing. The longer and more detailed the prompt, the more complex and accurate the image becomes. Then you can adjust the Element and Genre settings on the page to customise the result. This isn’t the only example of instant imagery on the market, but it’s definitely one of the most fun and versatile.