1. Create your free account
Go to leonardo.ai and sign up with Google, Apple, or an email address. No credit card is needed to start. The free plan gives you 150 fast tokens a day, and they reset every day. Tokens are the platform's currency: every generation, upscale, or edit costs a few of them, and heavier settings cost more. One thing to know up front: images you make on the free plan are public by default, so they can appear in Leonardo's community feed. Do not generate anything private or confidential on a free account.
2. Generate your first image
Click Image Generation and type your description in the prompt box. The more specific you are, the better the result: name the subject, the style, the lighting, and a few details. For example, "a cozy bookshop at night, warm lamplight, watercolor style" will beat "a bookshop" every time. Then pick an aspect ratio — square for social posts, wide for banners — and hit Generate. You will get a set of images to choose from. Click your favourite to download it, upscale it, or create variations of it. If you want a purely artistic tool for comparison, our beginner's guide to Midjourney is a good next read.
3. Pick the right model for the job
The model dropdown matters more than most beginners realise. Lucid Origin is the best all-rounder for everyday images. Phoenix 1.0 follows prompts very closely and handles text inside images better than most rivals, so use it for posters, logos, and signs. Lucid Realism suits cinematic, photorealistic looks. On top of those, there are more than 100 community fine-tuned models for anime, game assets, and other styles. If you want to see how Leonardo compares with the other free options, read our roundup of the best free AI image generators in 2026.
4. Edit and improve with AI Canvas
Canvas is Leonardo's built-in editor, and it is where good images become great ones. Inpainting lets you erase part of an image and regenerate just that area — fix a strange hand, swap a background, or change an object. Outpainting extends the image beyond its original edges. Realtime Canvas is the fun one: the picture updates live as you type, so you can sketch out an idea in seconds. You can also upload your own photo and restyle it. Adobe's Generative Fill works in a similar way, and our Adobe Firefly guide walks through that technique.
5. Upscale, animate, and train your own style
When an image is worth keeping, the Universal Upscaler sharpens it to a higher resolution for printing or large screens. Motion turns a still image into a short video clip, but it eats tokens fast, so save it for your best work. The most powerful paid feature is custom model training: upload a set of images in your own style, of your product, or of your character, and Leonardo fine-tunes a private model that keeps everything on-brand. Character consistency tools then help the same face or character appear across many images.
6. Free vs paid, and beginner mistakes to avoid
The free plan is genuinely enough to learn the platform. Paid plans start at around $12 a month on monthly billing, with annual billing cheaper, and they add private mode, more tokens, a faster queue, and relaxed generation on higher tiers. Leonardo refreshed its plan names during 2026, so check the current pricing page before you pay, and note that API access is billed separately. Now the mistakes: writing vague one-word prompts, switching on every enhancement at once and burning a day's tokens in minutes, generating private work on the free plan where it is public, and expecting perfect text in every image — Phoenix is good, but not flawless. Since Canva owns Leonardo, your finished images also drop neatly into Canva designs, and our Canva beginner's guide shows how.
Leonardo AI rewards a little patience: learn to write specific prompts, pick the right model, and finish your work in Canvas. Start free, and upgrade only when you regularly run out of tokens. What will you create first with Leonardo AI — a poster, a character, or something for your business? Tell us in the comments.
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