Your first image

This walks through one complete image, start to finish. Follow it exactly the first time; experiment afterwards.

1. Open your workspace

The left is a menu of everything you can make. The middle is where the tool you pick opens. The right is your library, empty for now.

If you would rather be shown than read, the middle offers Learn Studio and Take a Tour before you pick anything — the same ground, inside the app.

Nothing loads until you choose something. On the left, under Create, pick a tool — its panel then opens in the middle.

For a first picture, avoid Apex Image: it is the best image model here but it does not run until you have connected an avatar, and that is a detour. Start with Apex img2img if you have a picture to work from, or one of the Partner Models listed lower down, which need nothing set up.

The controls change with the tool you picked, which is why the panel is never quite the same twice.

3. Describe what you want

Type this, exactly:

a red fox asleep on a stack of old library books, warm afternoon light,
soft focus background

Three things are doing work there, and it is worth noticing which:

the subject — a red fox, asleep, on books
the lighting — warm afternoon light
the treatment — soft focus background

Subject alone gives you something generic. Subject plus lighting plus treatment is what makes a picture look deliberate. More on this in writing a prompt.

4. Leave the settings alone

There will be controls for size, quantity, quality and similar. Do not change them yet. The defaults are chosen to be sensible, and changing several at once means that when the result is wrong you will not know which change did it.

Settings explained covers each one when you are ready.

5. Generate

Press the generate button. The cost in credits is shown before you commit — it comes out of the allowance included with your plan.

Your picture appears in the library area, first as a placeholder and then as the finished image. An image usually takes a few seconds to a minute. If other people are generating heavily at the same time, yours waits its turn in a queue, and the status tells you where it is. See when something goes wrong for what each status means.

You can leave the page. The work carries on without you and it is in your library when you come back.

6. Look at it properly

Click the image to open it full size. From here you can:

Favourite it — the star. It then appears under Favorites.
Download it — the original file, saved to your device.
Make it bigger and sharper — upscaling, if you want it for print.
Remove something from it — if there is a distraction you want gone.

7. Now change one thing

Go back to the text box. Your prompt is still there. Change one word — make the fox a cat, or the afternoon light moonlight — and generate again.

Comparing two images that differ in one word teaches you more than ten images that differ in everything. This is the habit worth forming.