Codenamed Red Panda, the model does vector generation, text and more.
(Image credit: Recraft / AI-generated)
Just when we thought the positions in the list of the best AI image generators had all been taken, along comes a new contender apparently out of nowhere. Recraft, AKA Red Panda, offers a suite of tools and claims to be an "AI image generator for pro designers".
That's a position surely already claimed by Adobe Firefly. So what makes Recraft different? And what does it have to do with red pandas?
The Red Panda AI image generator sprang to attention when it jumped to the top of the the Artificial Analysis Text-to-Image Model Leaderboard, a ranking on Hugging Face that gives AI image generators scores based on quality, speed and price. It turned out that Red Panda was a codename for Recraft V3, the latest AI model from a London-based company that was founded in 2022 but which had largely gone by under the radar.
The Artificial Analysis Text-to-Image Model Leaderboard (Image credit: Artificial Analysis)
Is Recraft really for 'pro designers'? Well, I guess that's a broad term. It will be useful for some people who need to create design assets.
Unlike most of the more cowboy AI image generators like Midjourney, it aims to provide a suite of tools that allow AI image generation to be used more precisely to create assets from product mockups to social media content. It looks like it's aiming to compete with Adobe Express and Canva, providing more flexible and intuitive editing editing tools than straight image generators like Midjourney.
(Image credit: Recraft / AI-generated)
It can generate vectors as well as raster images, and, like Ideogram, Recraft is putting a big focus on the generation of accurate text rendering. Perhaps most uniquely, Recraft introduces the possibility of real-time collaboration, allowing peers to comment on projects on an infinite canvas. This is something that Adobe is working on in its Project Concept. Recraft has also launched an API, allowing businesses and developers to integrate it into their own systems.
(Image credit: Recraft / AI-generated)
Based on my very brief initial testing, Recraft does seem to handle prompts that call for text in images very well, perhaps even better than Ideogram, although it does still tend to have glitches in longer phrases. Photorealism doesn't seem to be far behind Midjourney or Flux. Meanwhile, the model's style options, from studio photo to engraving, aim to reduce the need to use long text prompts.
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The mockup generator appears to be fairly usable if you need a quick demonstration of a concept. Recraft's also plugging itself for AI logo generation.
Here's a mock-up of a torn T-Shirt featuring George Clooney that I knocked up in Recraft in 10 seconds (Image credit: Recraft / AI-generated)
Recraft claims to already have 1.5 million users. Pricing ranges from a free plan with 50 credits a day and public image generation to paid plans running from $10 per month for 1000 monthly credits to $47 a month for 8400 credits.
Recraft says paid plans give users the "full ownership and commercial rights to any generation", but this is AI we're talking about: good luck trying to argue your case if someone uses an image you generated without your permission. I've not been able to glean any information about the ethics of Recraft's training process, and it appears to allow the generation of celebrity likenesses.
The company was founded by Anna Veronika Dorogush, whose LinkedIn profile cites stints in software engineering at Google and Microsoft before she joined Yandex to work on the open-source gradient-boosting framework CatBoost.
Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
