Image generation is the veteran tech of AI. While the market is dominated by companies like Midjourney and Google, Ideogram has managed to keep pace in our list of the best AI image generators, and has just introduced the Ideogram 2.0a model — a faster, cheaper alternative to its original product.
I tested out the new model to see whether it was a worthy successor, and what I found was quite surprising in a number of ways.
The company originally made its name from producing high quality, interesting images which followed prompt instructions well, and delivered excellent text elements. So I was excited to see whether the latest update had improved on these qualities.
My goal was to produce five images for the test, with no specific science behind the prompts, just a range of creative demands which are typically challenging for image generators.
The focus was on five categories: people, place, nature, portrait and design.
Ideogram offers a range of custom settings users can choose from, including aspect ratio, generation speed (slower equals higher quality) and pre-sets such as design, 3D, anime and realistic.
Each generation costs a number of credits depending on processing demands, and delivers four sample images to choose from.
Ready to see how the model got on? Here we go.
Test One – People
Prompt: a beautiful family birthday party in an English country garden in the mid-afternoon, with a cake on which is written “Happy Birthday Maggie”.
Out of the twelve test images I created with this prompt, this one was the best overall. But only because of the prompt adherence.
There were other images with fewer glitches but they failed to deliver key features, for example a cake with writing or the garden scenario. Even with this winning image, while the overall composition is good, look closely and you’ll notice a few hand glitches which ruin the overall effect.
Test Two – Nature
Prompt: 4 majestic elephants on the savanna, medium shot, natural afternoon lighting, National Geographic, Nikon camera, award winning, with a small wooden building to the rear with a sign saying 'Safari' on it, photo, typography, cinematic
It took me twenty attempts to get this particular image. For some reason image AI has a problem with creating realistic looking elephants. And math, apparently. In this case four was a challenge, so we received three elephants which I guess is better than nothing.
My main gripe is with uniformity, so many of the animals looked like clones, which was a shame.
I selected this image in particular because of the excellent text adherence, which many of the other images fail to produce. And is that just a half elephant in the background?
Test Three – Place
Prompt: A street photograph, Canon EOS, a group of 5 friends enjoying a Sunday afternoon coffee at a pavement café in Paris called Gaucho, soft lighting, colorful
Once again out of the sixteen images I generated, this was the closest to the prompt, and featured a clear text element.
There are glitches unfortunately, but many of the other images, while better, had unnatural poses or no text at all. It seems surprisingly difficult to generate a clean and accurate image with this new model. Especially if there is text in it.
Test Four – Portrait
Prompt: A close-up portrait of an elderly fiercely charismatic Asian fisherman, looking past the camera with epic afternoon lighting beside a small village river.
It seems that portrait photography is a much easier task for the new 2a model. I generated twenty shots and a good half dozen of them were pretty decent.
There were one or two framed in city settings and one with a bizarre Scottish hat on, but overall the quality was good. My suspicion is when the subject is singular and there’s no requirement for text processing, the model has a much easier task of meeting the prompt requirements.
Test Five – Design
Prompt: A range of ultra luxury chocolates called Finesse.
Sixteen images of chocolates produced this rather nicely balanced shot, which you could imagine in a magazine advert.
Unfortunately again, as with so many of the generated images with this model, it’s so close and yet not quite right.
The text drifts off into nonsense, and while I think many image generators suffer the same problem, it’s still a shame. But overall, not bad at all.
Conclusion
I have to admit to being rather disappointed with the overall fidelity and quality of the images from the new Ideogram 2a model. It seems that the company has opted for cutting back the original Ideogram quality in favor of speed and a lower price per generation.
I learned to rely on the quality setting and Realistic pre-set in order to get the best out of the images I created. But even so there were far too many glitches and lackadaisical prompt adherence problems for a product at this level.
However there is one huge silver lining. I stumbled onto the edit Canvas function during the test, and it’s excellent.
It’s super easy to use, very powerful and allows for a huge amount of customization, editing, extending and polish which you won’t find on most other image generation tools.
It’s clear that many of the gallery images on the site have made considerable use of this editor to improve the original generations. But why not?
The example above is me inserting a chilled lion into a group of elephants on this heavily edited and extended image. Done in about 20 seconds.
Let me know what you think of the images and how well they adhere to the prompts in the comments below.
More from Tom's Guide
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
