Midjourney has had such a big global impact ever since it was released that it's become difficult for other text-to-image tools to gain popularity. Like any other AI-powered tool that's currently available, Midjourney is far from perfect. It won't come as a surprise when other similar tools start popping up and providing better results.
Time in the AI industry moves incredibly fast. It's hard to keep up with all of the different tools that are being released. The progress we've witnessed in less than a year is hard to describe in words.
One of the new text-to-image AI tools that recently caught my eye is called Leonardo. I heard people talking about it online so I wanted to check it out. Let me start off by saying that I love Midjourney and I use it often.
I know how difficult it is to get to the level Midjourney has reached, so I didn't have high expectations for this new tool that was released in February 2023. Still, I wanted to see what it had to offer. Is it a good Midjourney alternative? We'll talk about that later on in the article.
For now, let me show you how you can sign up for this platform.
How to Sign Up for Leonardo.Ai
The first thing you'll need to do is navigate to the official Leonardo.Ai website. Once you visit the homepage, you will see that you can sign up for exclusive early-bird access.
You only need to enter your email address to sign up for the early access version of the platform. When you submit your address, you will receive an email that includes additional information about Leonardo.
The email notes that you'll be among the first people to gain access to the Leonardo.Ai production suite. At the time of writing this article, there are a little under 50 thousand members in the Leonardo Discord server. Compare this to the millions of people that are in the Midjourney server and you'll see just how early you can be to Leonardo.
The email mentions how you can get early access to upcoming features, speak to the dev team, and get free Pro tier access if you're an active community member. The community in this server is amazing and feels much more intimate than the Midjourney server. However, this will probably change if Leonardo reaches the same level of popularity as its main competitor.
You'll also notice how there is a paragraph in the email saying that you can get priority early access if you join the Discord server and introduce yourself.
There is a special channel on the server where you can introduce yourself. The channel is called 'introductions' and all you have to do is drop any message for the bot to send you a message and direct you to another channel where you can find additional details for priority early access.
In the priority early access channel, you'll find a form that you have to fill out. After you do this, it will take up to a few days for you to receive an email notifying you that you're whitelisted and that you can start using the platform.
In this email, you'll find out more information about the platform. For instance, you'll learn that datasets are private during early access, the models you fine-tune are private by default, and the images you generate will be public for now.
How to Use Leonardo.Ai
When you navigate to the platform and log in with your email, you will have to pick out a username and at least one interest from the several provided.
After you finish this step, you can start using the Leonardo production sweet.
I was immediately impressed by how the platform is designed. It's incredibly easy to use and all of the features are intuitive. You can pick out the model you want to use, how many images you want to be generated, as well as the image dimensions. You also get 250 tokens per day that you can use. It takes up to a few tokens to generate one set of images.
I decided that I was going to generate images with a width of 1280 pixels and a height of 768 pixels. The first prompt I decided to enter was "the birth of the universe". This was generated with the Stable Diffusion 1.5 model. The result is quite interesting.
The image is much better than I expected it to be. I tried some more complex prompts after this but it didn't give the same result. I think that it will get much better with complex prompts in the near future though.
I decided to keep it simple for the next several prompts and see what type of images would be generated. I really liked the result when I typed "green landscape".
The result looks like a really cool painting that I wouldn't mind hanging up on my wall. Although it's amazing what Leonardo generated, this is far from the best part of this production suite.
Choose Your Model on Leonardo.Ai
The option to choose a model for image generation is where Leonardo truly shines. This is an incredible feature that every text-to-image prompt enthusiast will enjoy. The model you choose will have a big impact on the way the image will be generated. Take this example of a medieval knight generated through the RPG 4.0 model.
The results are just what I wanted from a model with RPG in its name. There are many different models that you can choose from, depending on your preferences.
Some of the featured models you can see in the image above include interesting concepts like spirit creatures, cute animal characters, isometric sci-fi buildings, and more.
I really like pixel art, so I was very happy to see that this was one of the featured models. In the description for this model, you can see that it was trained mostly on headshots. I decided to give it a try and wanted to see what would be generated if I entered a simple, one-word prompt - elf.
I honestly can't pick out which one of these four variations I like best. All of them are perfect, at least for my taste in pixel art.
Best Midjourney Alternative?
Leonardo.Ai is an awesome Midjourney alternative that is completely free for now. The discord community is great and will make you feel welcome as soon as you join. The dev team gives regular updates and stays in contact with the community.
The best part of this AI-powered text-to-image tool is that you have many different models to choose from. You have the option to choose what type of image you want to generate before you even type in the prompt. This makes image generation quite practical.
At the time of writing this article, Leonardo.Ai is still in its early access phase. You can sign up for their platform on the official Leonardo.Ai website.
