Meet Leonardo: The Midjourney KILLER! Quick-start Guide

Leonardo.ai is the new kid on the AI block and it’s rivaling Midjourney for the quality of images it’s producing.

Just take a look at some of these beautiful worlds’ fantastic pixelated character designs and these mesmeric surreal landscapes.

I’m going to show you how to get set up with Leonardo as quickly as possible and start exploring this new player in the game.

Getting Started with Leonardo.ai

So, step one, come to Leonardo.ai.

Go to the top right-hand corner and click on get Early Access.

From here we’re going to enter our email address and click on Count Me In.

We come to our email and we see this email that we’ve got from Leonardo.

And what you have to do now is join the Discord server from the email that you receive the message.

So, click the link in the message and you’ll be taken to Discord.

Here you’ll be prompted to choose a username or log in with your existing Discord account.

After this, you enter your date of birth.

Finish up by entering your email and claiming your account.

Onboarding Section

After this, there is a short onboarding section where you can define what you’re going to use Leonardo for.

You can select what applies to yourself.

Here explains that Leonardo is a separate application and it does not run in Discord like Midjourney.

So, click yes and go to finish.

Introducing Yourself

Finally, we have to come on the left-hand side down to the chat introductions underneath general and you’re gonna have to introduce yourself.

If you can’t see the box make sure that you’ve verified your email.

It also may ask you to wait 10 minutes before you can introduce yourself to this chat.

Once you’ve waited your 10 minutes you can enter your information into the Discord chat.

Say, “Hello, I’m new here.”

Now you can sit back and wait until you receive an email.

This can take anything from an hour or two to a couple of days because they’re letting people in batches so they send out a huge batch of emails in one go.

Finally, you’re gonna get an email telling you that you’ve been white-listed and it will look like this.

From there you can go to the Leonardo app and log in with your white-listed account.

And that’s it, now you’re into Leonardo.ai.

Features of Leonardo.ai

Let’s explain a little bit more about what makes Leonardo different that the other AI art generators on the market.

Leonardo is a platform that gives you a whole host of different features that you can use.

It has more features than a competitor like Midjourney and it also boasts the ability to create visually stunning images.

Leonardo has marketed itself with a focus on game asset design but that’s not all it’s capable of.

What I love about Leonardo is its user-friendly interface.

Compare this to perhaps the most popular web UI for Stable Diffusion AUTOMATIC1111.

And you can see that it’s much easier to navigate.

Models of Leonardo.ai

So when you first arrive at Leonardo.ai, you’ll be able to select which model you want to start using.

This is the data set that the AI art generator has been trained with and it has a number of different options.

Deliberate is a powerful model that is great for photorealism and artistic creations.

There are different models for different use cases specifically vintage style photography, role-playing games, anime, paper art styles like Japanese origami, illustration, and many many more.

Using Leonardo.ai

Step 1. Select a Model

To select the model, you want to use all you have to do is click on it and go to generate with this model.

So, you can see here that the UI is much easier to navigate than the overwhelming feature-burdened version of AUTOMATIC 1111.

It also has a more visual experience than that of MidJourney’s discord chat UI.

Step 2. Enter Your Prompt

And all you have to do is enter your prompt here.

I’ve selected the isometric fantasy model and I’m going to type in: monument valley style tower which is a classic isometric game that I enjoyed.

Step 3. Add Leonardo Style

Next up, you can add Leonardo style or not.

This defines whether you want Leonardo to add its own unique aesthetic additions.

Step 4. Define a Negative Prompt

And after that, you can define a negative prompt which is anything that you don’t want to include.

So, the prompt is what you do want, and the negative prompt is what you don’t want.

For example, I can click on yes and I can type in colors or objects.

Step 5. Prompt Magic Option

And next up, the other option is prompt magic.

This is a feature Leonardo is experimenting with in refining how much an image represents the prompt that you put in.

You can leave that off for now.

Step 5. Generate Your Images

Now, an important thing to note is that Leonardo gives you a very reasonable free allowance of 250 tokens a day.

You use up different amounts of tokens depending on the parameters that you choose to generate your images.

So, for instance, this will cost me 3 tokens and every day you get 250.

So, you can go ahead and generate.

And you’re going to get yourself out an image.

I’ve elaborated on my prompt a little bit and I’ve added in a few more defining words: monument valley game isometric style arabian tower.

And now you will get your images generated.

Take a look at some of these, they’re looking pretty good.

More Options on Leonardo.ai

Once you open it up you have the option to delete the image, download it, or unzoom.

What unzoom does is it starts to paint around the image and extend it.

You can see here that it elaborated on these cliffs and started to introduce so more depth at the bottom of the image.

And it’s great if you’ve got an image and you want to essentially outpaint from the center to enlarge the scene.

This was a tool that was originally made popular in DALL·E.

You can also remove the background inside of Leonardo.

If you’re working on a game asset or a sticker or a gif or an icon is a great tool for speeding up your process.

This costs a single token.

You can also upscale the image which increases the resolution.

This costs a single token but it may change some of the details inside of your image.

There is also an alternative upscaling algorithm that you can try using which is upscale image alternate.

And to download all you have to do is click on the downward pointing arrow.

Now that’s how you generate images inside of Leonardo.

More Features of Leonardo.ai

You might be wondering what all of these other features are on the left-hand side.

1. Number of Images

Well, the first row defines how many images you generate at a time.

And this affects the number of credits that you’re going to be using.

2. Image Dimensions

The second option is the image dimensions which is defining the aspect ratio and the detail of your original creation.

Everything from 512 up to 10 24.

You’ll find these sliders as well so you can easily adjust the width and the height.

You can also use the drop-down to select specific popular aspect ratios.

But you have a range from 512 all the way up to 1536.

3. Guidance Scale

The next option is the guidance scale.

Which is how strongly your prompt is weighted and how much influence the algorithm and the model have on defining your work.

4. Step Count

After this, we have step count.

A higher step count may result in more detail but it does take longer to render.

So, it’s the idea of the number of steps that are taken between the original noise that starts off the model generation to the end product.

5. Tiling

Next up, we have tiling.

Which is your ability to take the image and lay it in a grid so that it matches up perfectly.

This is great for patterns or backgrounds or for seamless textures.

6. Image to Image

The final option that we have here is Image to Image.

Which allows us to insert an image and use that as a prompt.

So, to do that all you have to do is click on upload select the image that you want to use and you can select a few options here.

The first is Pose to Image which helps you maintain consistent poses between images.

And also the Init Strength defines how much of the original image you preserve and how much it changes.

Then when you’re ready you can go ahead and generate again with these new settings.

This is one area where you have a lot more control over the image definition process than Midjourney.

And it’s done a great job at not overwhelming you with every single feature possible to use as well as naming them clearly and giving good user interface elements to control them.

Final Thoughts

Leonardo is a game changer and taking each as a Stable Diffusion and infusing them into a useful web UI as well as offering a very friendly free limit or uses.

If you come back to the home section of Leonardo by clicking on the top left-hand corner on the little arrow, you’ll also be able to explore other parts of the website.

I particularly like the community feed for finding inspiration from what others in the community have been creating.

That’s the quickest way to get set up and started in Leonardo.

Let me know if you want more Leonardo content and how you find it compared to Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.

Make sure to watch this video next and thanks for watching!

If you find this article helpful, make sure to check out our other reads below.

NEW 360° VR WORLDS With Midjourney: HERE’S HOW

Is This The FUTURE of Music? AI-Generated EMINEM by David Guetta + How to Make Yours!

ControlNet: Perfect Composition in Stable Diffusion | Colab One-Click Install & Tutorial