Finally some real competition for Midjourney

If you know me, you probably know I’m a fan of Midjourney. It’s a great AI image generator that enables the creation of beautiful images with very little prompt engineering required. Their model is just that good. As far as I know, you can still try it for free, but I find their subscription to be comparatively expensive for something I don’t use very often.

However, if you’re looking for something more advanced that allows more control over what you can generate, and allows you to do so for free within generous limits, then Leonardo.ai might be the tool to keep tabs on. But what makes it so cool?

Features and examples

I think some really great features are:

• It allows you to choose from several pre-trained models, each resulting in different image styles.
• It allows you to train your own models.
• It has a graphical user interface that gives you more control over the generated image, compared to Midjourney where the entire process is controlled by your input text.
• It’s available in early access, and you get 150 credits for free every day. That’s enough to generate a decent amount of images.

But besides all that, there are two interesting features that Leonardo.ai has over Midjourney:

Interesting feature number 1: AI Canvas

Leonardo has an AI canvas feature that allows you to ‘paint’ on a canvas using AI, thus enabling you to modify or expanding your existing photos or generated images with more content!

For example, here’s boring input image:

And this is how Leonardo.ai filled in the surrounding area a bit more:

Pretty cool, right? And it works even better with it’s own beautiful AI generated art.

Interesting feature number 2: Texture generation

Leonardo has a texture generation feature, enabling you to generate 2D textures for 3D models. But, I tried it and it doesn’t really seem useful to me right now for anything realistic.

But to be fair, I haven’t really looked at the documentation of this feature yet.

It’s nice to see this kind of app just appear from out of nowhere, while the larger companies still haven’t released their AI generators. Of those, there are two to keep watching for sure:

• Nvidia Picasso - Yes, AI 3D content generation is really going to be a thing in game development.

• Adobe Firefly - Adobe has a long history of creating the best applications related to graphical design.

Most interestingly, Adobe and Nvidia seem to be working together on their projects. While we wait for them to release, I think Leonardo.ai and Midjourney are the best things you can use right now.