From the looks of it, generative artificial intelligence (AI) knows no bounds when it comes to models that offer to take your creativity to the next level. One such platform, which goes beyond merely incorporating generative AI art technology as a way to ensure its synergy with human creativity, rather than suppressing it, is Leonardo.Ai.
It’s early days for this AI art generative tool, but there’s a lot to anticipate for creators who love to explore, and push the boundaries of their artistic visions. Leonardo.AI may just help them to redefine the creative AI landscape, and take their imaginations to the next level.
So, what is Leonardo.ai and what can it to for you? Is it worth learning Leonardo when Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, and more are already out there?
In this post, we’ll show you what it can do!
What Is Leonardo.Ai?
Leonardo.ai is poised to redefine what creative AI actually means, even though the model is still in its infancy. And that’s because this generative AI art tool is already being used to create stunning visuals, and is gaining popularity in the creative industries of gaming, fashion, architecture, advertising, and animation.
This GAN (generative adversarial network) image generation powerhouse already being used by millions worldwide, and has recently launched an enterprise version with collaboration tools and APIs for those interested in building custom tech infrastructures.
The AI has been built on open-source technologies, and trained using both synthetic data and data from Creative Commons.
So, what makes Leonardo stand out from the generative AI art crowd?
High Quality, Artistic Images
Midjourney is considered by most to the the best quality image generator, though it’s a bit fussy. Midjourney makes the most “artistic” images, though it doesn’t always follow prompts as well as, say, Dall-E.
Leonardo is quite impressive in its image generation capabilities, as the images in this post show. They are surprisingly well-composed, and follow prompts pretty well.
This is one of the reason many are switching from Midjourney over to Leonardo.
Easy to Use Features
There’s its array of cutting-edge backend features, which allows for it to excel at fine-tuning, training speed, custom upscaling, and multi-image prompting — and that’s just for starters.
The UI is certainly easier to understand and implement than Midjourney’s current discord system, with toggle-able options and menus, rather than arcane commands.
Remove backgrounds with a touch of a button, add in elements from other images, etc.
Animation Capabilities
With a built in animation feature, Leonardo steps beyond what even Midjourney offers. It’s pretty easy to animate any image you generate, bringing your creations to life. Here’s an animation of the woman in the header images of this article — it did a great job!
A Fairly Generous Free Plan
Add in a free plan that provides 150 credits every 8 hours, with each image set costing 8 credits and each animation costing 25, you can generate quite a bit with only the free plan.
Texture Generation
Generating game textures is incredibly easy in Leonardo, and is one of the areas where it really shines compared to other image generation systems.
What Does Leonardo AI Do?
Since Leonardo AI is a web-based platform, all users need is a stable internet connection and a compatible web browser, in order to access its features. It has been reported to be compatible with most modern web browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and even on mobile browsers like the one on the Galaxy S9.
There’s even a desktop app available for Mac, Windows, and Linux to ensure that users can leverage its features, regardless of your preferred browsing environment, making the platform accessible for creators of all skill levels, and you won’t need to know any coding to get started.
The development team actively listens to user feedback to implement improvements, and refine the AI models’ performance. In addition, Leonardo.AI is compatible with other popular design tools like Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator, as well as game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine.
This means that artists and designers will be able to incorporate the AI-generated assets from Leonardo.AI seamlessly into their projects and workflows without disruption.
You can use Leonardo.Ai can be used to create a variety of art, including social media models, concept art, 3D assets, graphic design, fashion, marketing, advertising, product photography, and architectural and interior designs, because the platform has an array of features that allow users to have greater control over the generation process.
Leonardo.AI is also able to generate stunning and high-quality images for game design, such as items, environments and worlds, helmets, buildings, and concept art, which has already made it a hit with gaming developers and artists.
In fact, the platform allows users to rapidly train their own AI models, and has been specifically designed to cater to the needs of game developers, offering features that facilitate the generation of assets for video games, including textures, and objects.
Is Leonardo.ai Just For Gamers?
It’s been established that Leonardo.Ai is great at generating assets for game projects, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not versatile enough to create other kinds of visual assets for creative projects.
In fact, its versatility and features make it suitable for a wide range of creative endeavors beyond game development, including concept art, graphic design, fashion, marketing, and advertising.
For instance, Leonardo.Ai can be used to create unique and captivating artwork, so can be useful for businesses to ensure that their brand image is distinct and impactful by generating logos, icons, and other visual assets that stand out quickly to stay ahead of the competition.
In addition, the platform’s AI-generated artwork can be used as visuals for marketing campaigns, advertising, and product design, providing an edge in the ever-evolving digital marketing world. Leonardo.Ai can also be used to help you create visually appealing ads that will lead to increased engagement, due to its unprecedented quality, speed of processing, and style-consistency.
And as far as other design applications go, there are no limits. For instance, if you’re a budding fashion designer (or know of one), then Leonardo.ai could become your new BFF. That’s because it’s easy to use this AI image generation tool to create various visual assets that are relevant to the fashion industry.
This means Leonardo.ai’s features, such as the AI canvas and 3D texture generation, can be applied to create designs for accessories or other fashion items.
You can also use Leonardo.ai to assist you in the creation of architectural and interior design projects, including building models, and environments, as well as create unique, production-ready assets for graphic design projects.
So, What Makes Leonardo.ai Different?
So, now you may be wondering what makes Leonardo AI different from say Craiyon, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney or DALL-E, which are also generative AI art platforms that allow users to create artwork from their text prompts.
Well, for instance, when compared to Stable Diffusion, which is also pretty simple to use, Leonardo.Ai is considered to have an even more friendly user interface than the former. It also integrates with a community that’s similar to CivitAI, which makes it even more accessible and easier to use for creators of all backgrounds and skill levels.
This is why Leonardo AI’s user interface has been highlighted as its distinguishing feature, which has also widened its appeal to a vast range of users. What this all means is that Leonardo AI is being regarded as more user-friendly when it comes to AI image generation, compared to Stable Diffusion.
There have also been observations from some users that the results from Leonardo AI look a lot better than those from Stable Diffusion when using the same prompt.
This suggests that the former may introduce terms into the prompts that aren’t displayed, based on settings in the app.
We decided to put this to the test to see what would happen. Our prompt for both AI image generating platforms was:
60 year young female with main character energy wearing leopard print with flowers in her afro
And here was the result:
As you can see, although Stable Diffusion put the flowers in her hair, as per our prompt, the Leonardo.Ai image is far more realistic, and with a bit more tweaking of the image, we have no doubt that it would have matched our prompt eventually.
These images took us no more than a couple of minutes to generate on each platform.
Of course, the choice you make between the two models will vary on a case-by-case basis, depending on your specific preferences, and the desired level of texture and focus on elements of the composition.
Here’s a comparison between Leonardo and Midjourney. The prompt was:
A water droplet containing a beautiful utopian forest world. Outside the drop is a dark, mechanistic, polluted, fetid world, highly detailed
Surprisingly similar images! I think I like the Midjourney one a slight bit more, but it actually took me a few generations to get that particular image. The Leonardo image was a single generation.
Content Control
Leonardo.ai differentiates itself from other generative AI art platforms, because it provides users with a high level of control over their generated content. For example, its Live Canvas feature allows users to not only enter a text prompt, but also to make a quick sketch.
And as you sketch, Leonardo.Ai then creates a photorealistic image, based on both your text prompt and sketch in real time, which will help you to guide the AI in its image generation process. This emphasis on user control also makes Leonardo.Ai an excellent choice for creating visually appealing ads. Pretty amazing, don’t you think?
The platform even gives users the ability to adjust their output using features like High-Resolution toggle and Contrast Boost, so that you can create visually appealing ads efficiently, and with ease.
Final Thoughts
Leonardo.ai is generative AI art tool is already giving immense promise to creators wanting to elevate their artistic visions, due to its emphasizing of human creativity and collaboration, rather than becoming its replacement.
Its distinctive features and versatility make it suitable for most creative endeavors, and its emphasis on user-friendly control allows even beginners to get their creative juices flowing within seconds of inputting their prompts.
As Leonardo.ai continues to evolve and gather momentum, it signifies a shift in the generative AI art landscape.
So, if you’re a creator looking to explore new horizons and push the boundaries of your imagination, why not have a go with Leonardo?
