Leonardo AI Review 2025: Features, Pricing & How to Create Videos

Looking for a comprehensive Leonardo AI review? This guide is for you. In a world of generative AI platforms, Leonardo AI has carved out a unique space, offering a powerful, integrated ecosystem for artists, designers, and developers. We will conduct a comprehensive analysis, moving beyond feature lists to provide expert insights, practical workflows, and a granular breakdown of its performance in 2025. Discover how it stacks up against rivals like Midjourney and DALL-E 3 and learn how to use it to create stunning videos with Wondershare Filmora.

Part 1. What is Leonardo AI? A Comprehensive 2025 Overview

Leonardo AI is a full-fledged generative AI content production platform. This is a crucial distinction. It is not just an ai art generator; it's an integrated ecosystem designed for creating high-quality visual assets, maintaining style consistency, and managing the entire creative workflow from concept to finished product. Founded in 2022 with a focus on solving asset production bottlenecks in the video game industry, Leonardo AI's DNA is rooted in professional-grade features like 3D Texture Generation and Custom Model training. This focus on utility and control fueled its meteoric rise, growing to over 30 million users by 2025. The platform's trajectory was solidified in July 2024 when it was acquired by the global visual communication platform Canva, ensuring its continued innovation and integration into mainstream creative tools.

Who is Leonardo AI For?

While it began with a focus on game developers, Leonardo AI's audience has diversified dramatically.

• For Beginners & Hobbyists: An excellent starting point. The generous free tier is a perfect, risk-free sandbox for learning the fundamentals.
• For Professional Artists & Designers: An indispensable tool. The ability to train custom models for stylistic consistency is a game-changing feature.
• For Businesses & Enterprise Teams: A powerful, scalable solution. API access and team features make it a robust platform for integrating generative AI into commercial pipelines.

Leonardo AI Pricing Explained

Leonardo AI operates on a freemium model that combines subscription tiers with a token-based economy. Nearly every creative action, from generating an image to training a model, consumes tokens, allowing for fair metering of computationally expensive tasks. Here is a breakdown of the subscription plans available in 2025:

Part 2. Leonardo AI Features: Image to Video & Custom Models

Leonardo AI's strength lies in its comprehensive and deeply integrated set of creative tools. It's an arsenal designed not just to generate images, but to give you granular control over the entire creative process.

1. AI Image Generator

This is the heart of the platform. It's a sophisticated system built on a curated library of diverse, fine-tuned models, allowing users to select the perfect engine for their specific task. Key models include:

• Leonardo PhotoReal: The go-to model for stunning realism, often paired with the proprietary Alchemy Refiner.
• Leonardo Kino XL: Expertly tuned to produce images with dramatic lighting and a cinematic feel.
• DreamShaper: A highly versatile community-favorite model known for producing a wide range of artistic styles.
• Flux Phoenix: A newer model praised in tutorials for its advanced capabilities and creative outputs.

2. Image to Image & Realtime Canvas

This is where Leonardo AI becomes an interactive creative partner. The Image to Image feature uses an input image's composition and colors to guide the generation process.

The Realtime Canvas is an interactive digital easel where you can draw and paint while the AI generates and updates the image in real-time based on your inputs and prompt. It transforms creation into a dynamic dialogue between artist and AI, perfect for rapid ideation and direct art direction.

3. Motion & AI Video Generation

Recognizing the need for dynamic content, Leonardo AI introduced Motion, a tool for animating still images. With a single click, it transforms a static generation into a short video clip with subtle, realistic camera movements and parallax effects. For more advanced capabilities, the platform is integrating powerful text-to-video models like Veo 3, allowing users to generate short video clips directly from text prompts.

4. Custom Model Training & Elements

This is arguably Leonardo AI's most professional-grade feature. It gives you the ability to train the AI on a specific aesthetic. By uploading a small set of images, you can create a private model that generates new assets with unparalleled consistency—a game-changer for maintaining brand identity or character likeness. Elements are smaller, mix-and-match style models that can be layered on top to infuse specific textures or lighting styles.

5. Universal Upscaler

The Universal Upscaler intelligently increases the resolution of your images while adding fine detail, enhancing sharpness, and removing artifacts. It is far more advanced than a simple resize function and is the final, crucial step in taking your AI art from a digital draft to a print-ready masterpiece.

Part 3. Leonardo AI vs. Midjourney & DALL-E 3: 2025 Comparison

To truly assess Leonardo AI's standing, we must place it in the ring with its heavyweight rivals: Midjourney, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion. Each has a distinct philosophy and excels in a different domain.

How to Use Leonardo AI: Your First Masterpiece in 5 Minutes

Diving into Leonardo AI is surprisingly simple. This quick-start guide will walk you through creating your first stunning piece of art.

1. Sign Up and Get Acquainted: Navigate to the official Leonardo AI website and sign up for a free account. On the dashboard, you'll see your daily token balance (150) and the main navigation panel on the left.
2. Navigate to Image Generation: Click on "Image Generation" in the left panel. This is your main creative hub.
3. Write Your First Prompt: The quality of your prompt directly influences the output. Let's use a descriptive and evocative prompt. Paste this into the prompt box:

A photorealistic portrait of an astronaut exploring a dense, glowing neon jungle on an alien planet, cinematic lighting, volumetric fog, detailed suit with reflections of the vibrant flora, 8k, epic, awe-inspiring.

1. Select a Model and Configure: In the settings panel on the left, make these selections:
   • Fine-Tuned Model: Choose Leonardo PhotoReal.
   • Leonardo Alchemy: Toggle this ON and select the "Photography" preset. This will use more tokens but dramatically improve quality.
   • Image Dimensions: Choose a cinematic aspect ratio like 16:9.
2. Generate & Refine: Hit the "Generate" button. Once your image appears, hover over it and click the Universal Upscaler icon. This will enhance the resolution and detail, adding a final professional polish. After upscaling, you can download your masterpiece.

Part 4. Beyond the Still Image: Creating Videos with Your AI Art Using Filmora

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You've generated a breathtaking still image, but in today's digital landscape, dynamic content is king. The challenge is bridging the gap between your static art and the engaging world of video. For this, .we recommend Wondershare Filmora, a powerful AI video editor that creates a seamless workflow for AI artists.

Filmora is the logical next step because its user-friendly interface and robust AI features complement Leonardo AI's output perfectly. The most powerful of these is Filmora's AI Image to Video tool, which leverages advanced models to transform your stills into dynamic videos with realistic, AI-generated animation.

Here's a simple workflow:

1. Generate in Leonardo AI: Create and download your high-resolution image.
2. Import to Filmora: Open Filmora and drag your image into the media library.
3. Animate: Use the AI Image to Video feature and select a style, or manually add motion effects like Pan & Zoom.
4. Enhance: Add transitions, titles, and effects from Filmora's library. Drag a royalty-free music track onto the audio timeline.
5. Export: Preview your work and export the final video, ready for your portfolio or social media.

By pairing Leonardo AI's world-class image generation with Filmora's intuitive video editing suite, you complete the creative cycle, transforming yourself from an image creator into a true visual storyteller.

Conclusion

After an exhaustive analysis, our conclusion is clear. Leonardo AI has decisively carved out its identity not just as another AI art generator, but as a premier, all-in-one generative creative suite. Its core philosophy is one of empowerment. Where other tools offer a simple path to a beautiful image, Leonardo AI provides a comprehensive workshop and places the tools directly into the hands of the creator.

In 2025, Leonardo AI stands tall as a mature, feature-rich, and forward-looking platform. It has successfully moved beyond the hype to deliver a tool of tangible, sustainable value.

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