Krea
A real-time canvas: sketch on the left, watch the finished image redraw on the right as you move.
Prompt-only generation is a slot machine — write, wait, look, rewrite. Krea closes that loop. Its Realtime Canvas puts a rough sketch or a shape on one side and a rendered image on the other, and it re-renders continuously as you draw. Move a rectangle and the building moves. Scribble a darker patch and the shadow follows.
That changes what the tool is for. You stop describing a composition in words and start arranging it, which is much closer to how anyone actually decides what a picture should look like.
Start here
Sign up (the free tier gives a daily allowance of compute units, no card needed), open Realtime, and try the workflow that shows the point in about a minute:
- Block out the composition with crude shapes — a rectangle for a screen, a blob where the subject goes.
- Write a short prompt describing the scene, not the details.
- Drag your shapes around and watch the render follow.
- When the layout is right, send it to the higher-quality Enhance step for the final.
Screenshots and photos work as the input too, which is the trick worth stealing: paste a screenshot of your app, describe the surrounding scene, and get a product shot with your real UI in it.
The tools that earn their keep
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Realtime | The live sketch-to-image canvas |
| Enhance / Upscale | Add resolution and detail to a finished frame |
| Train | Teach a style or subject from your own images, then generate in it |
| Video | Animate a still, or generate short clips |
The Train feature is the one teams underuse: a handful of reference images gets you a consistent illustration style across a whole blog, instead of every post looking like a different site.
The trade-off to plan around
Krea runs on compute units. The free daily allowance is enough to learn the tool and make the occasional asset; a real session of iterating burns through it, and realtime mode consumes them continuously while you draw. Paid tiers start around $9–10/month for a monthly pool, and units on individual plans don’t roll over.
Practical consequence: block out the composition first, enhance last. Time spent sitting on the realtime canvas thinking is time spent spending.
Commercial rights come with the paid tiers rather than the free one — check the current terms before shipping anything client-facing.
Krea or Raphael?
Raphael is for “I need an image, any decent image, now.” Krea is for “I know roughly what this should look like and I want to steer it.” If you find yourself re-rolling a prompt for the fifth time, that’s the signal to switch.
Next
Whatever made the image, it’s probably too small → Magnific
Last updated 23 Aug 2026, 00:00 UTC.