The Tools I'm Actually Using Right Now

People often ask which AI image tool I'd recommend, and my honest answer is never just one. The right question isn't "which is best" — it's "best for this specific project."

I reach for Midjourney on artistic and cinematic work, where aesthetics and composition matter most. Its recent versions (v7 and up) are still ahead on visual quality and mood — great for cover art, concept work, anything that needs to feel something.

When realism and speed matter — product shots, images that need to read as genuinely photographic — I use FLUX from Black Forest Labs. Its open-source models also mean I can run them on my own infrastructure instead of depending on a third-party service.

For anything that needs text rendered correctly inside the image — banners, posters, typography-heavy social posts — Ideogram is unmatched, hitting up to 95% accuracy on in-image text, well ahead of everything else I've tried.

What a lot of people miss is that there's no absolute "best" tool. Something that nails a poster might completely fail at a product shot. I usually switch between these three depending on the project — sometimes I use all three in the same piece.

If I had to sum it up: Midjourney for feeling, FLUX for realism, Ideogram for text. Knowing when to reach for which is its own skill — maybe more important than the tools themselves.