Leonardo AI Now Offers Loras

Leonardo AI, an excellent AI imaging app. generously offers a free tier of service to its users in the form of 150 credits a day with which to generate images.  The app is, however, a commercial venture and in order to increase its revenue stream has hit on the idea of adding new "premium" features, seemingly one every few weeks, that are only available to paying subscribers.  I can't really fault Leonardo for doing this since its subscription rates are reasonable enough (though they certainly have to be to remain competitive with Midjourney's) and the premium features themselves, such as Alchemy and PhotoReal, are generally very useful.

Leonardo's latest new paid feature is Elements, its own brand of LoRa (Low Rank Adaption) models that have the ability to greatly enhance the appearance of generated images, either on their own or in conjunction with the app's platform models.  Leonardo describes the new feature as follows:

"We are thrilled to announce that Leonardo Elements; our proprietary custom implementation of LoRA (Low-Rank Adaption) models are now available to use on the platform.

Taking advantage of Elements is easy; in order to get started hit the new ‘Add Elements‘ button under the prompt generation input:

Select from Elements you would like to use for your generation. You can select up to four Elements to combine, or use one on it’s own. Find and experiment with different styles, find your favorites - and go wild!

Once your selection is complete, you can adjust the weights for each Element to fine-tune your results. Adjust weights to get the perfect balance for your generation."

In addition to this introduction, there is a useful if overly long YouTube tutorial by Wade McMaster that tells everything there is to know about Elements and then some.  The video would actually have been better at half its almost 10 minute length.  As it is, there are a few too many samples shown and the accompanying commentary would have benefited by being more concise.

Leonardo has come a long way in only the past few months and now is fairly comparable to Midjourney in the quality of the images its generates and the features it provides.  It's the one app I feel makes it worth upgrading to a paid subscription, both for the aforementioned quality of its images and for its ease of use,  and I will probably do so sometime in the near future when I have more time.