How to make the BEST AI Coloring Pages EVER | A complete walkthrough to retouching AI images
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ต.ค. 2024
- AI coloring books are beginning to become much more common on Amazon. There's still a huge opportunity, but consumers are catching on to what is AI created, and likely lower quality - making it more important than ever to stand out.
This provides a challenge... and an opportunity.
In this video I'll take you through my complete step-by-step guide of how I retouch my AI generated coloring pages to make them the very best that they can be!
BECOME A VIP MEMBER:
Support the channel and get transparent monthly updates... including how much I earn, ad results, learnings, tips and tricks, AI prompts, niche ideas, shout-outs on the channel, and much much more!
/ @selfpublishingempire
If you want me to upscale and retouch your coloring pages, take a look here! www.fiverr.com/bookishcraig/upscale-and-retouch-your-ai-coloring-pages
Good video! Just spent a few hours doing exactly this today, and then I came across your video. I picked up a few extra pointers, thank you!
Some really good points here. So many of the videos on this topic talk about how quickly you can put a book like this together. Even if you do just churn out and dump in the images, it does take skill to put it all together in the correct format, do a cover, imprint page, set up the online selling accounts and settings, and write the blurbs.
I've started working on my own, because I'm fascinated by all the AI development, and I have 30 years in graphic design (on and off), and I like the idea of putting out my own publications rather than always working on other people's. Colouring books for now, but I have written some young children's books which I'd like to illustrate with the help of AI, and then self-publish.
I'm a designer, not a graphic artist, which means I can't draw for shit :) Computer tools, going right back to CorelDraw and Quark XPress have always helped me to get what is in my head onto the page, and in an accurate way I could never dream of doing by hand.
So, I'm loving the process of seeing what MidJourney comes up with, using a combination of its randomness and also trying to manipulate the prompts to get what I want.
My plan is to have a few points of difference: High quality, enhanced content (eg my curent one on cats also has interesting facts about them on each page, and the one on Australian animals I'm working on has info about them too), and hopefully a bit of creativity in terms of subjects I choose to work on.
I've spent hours and hours in Photoshop cleaning up the resultant images. I've found the easiest way for the ones I'm working on at the moment is to turn them into vector images using InkScape (my old version of Illustrator no longer works), then bringing them into Photoshop and working on them in there. That takes care of sharp lines and resolution. It wouldn't be suitable for images with a lot of gradation of tonality, but at the moment I'm doing high contrast colouring in images.
I could spend forever tweaking prompts, settings, cleaning up etc, but at some point I have to actually publish something :) Soon I hope!
Thank you for the detailed reply. I love that you're obviously thinking about how to differentiate from others and create good products (that's exactly my current approach as well). Have you tried vectorizer.ai, that might be a little quicker if you like the process of working with vectors :)
@@selfpublishingempire Thanks, I'll check it out. Inkscape is a bit clunky!
Awesome video, great tips, thanks for sharing!
Cheers Danny!
I’ve been doing this for a while, but I’ve realised that as soon as you ask mid journey for a detailed picture, you are looking at hours of clean up, and then end up ditching it anyway! Ask for simple images and then layer them in photoshop seems to work better
Thanks for the great advice Gill! For adult colouring books I like detailed images, but what I will do is not proceed if there's TOO much detail/non-sensical elements.
@@selfpublishingempire I’m tempted to pack it in, but I’ve put months into it at this stage, improving all the time. But like you I like the detailed images and it’s driving me mad. My hope is that the next mid journey update will fix a lot of it. I do frequently find that asking for a normal image with colour gives less mess, but it needs to be good enough to still be defined when you take the colour out in photoshop. Sometimes using ‘smart sharpening’ in photoshop will give a nice line around the details, but it only works well half the time. An endless battle 😄
Thank you for the video. Enjoy watching ❤
Thanks for watching!
Nice trick on the overlay layer! Great as well
Thanks SO much for this video, you read my mind x
Good ideas
This is what I do as well. Grayscale is the bane of my existence lol.
Excellent video ! To the point, useful and helpful! Thank you!
Tiny question 😊: do you think it's necessary, or even mandatory to state that the images were made via AI in a coloring book?
I think that’s entirely up to you. Personally i do not think it’s needed but i wouldn’t lie and claim they are hand drawn etc
@@selfpublishingempire yes, definitely agree! Tiny video suggestion: the "elusive" ideal prompts for coloring pages !! :)
Thank you....
nice job
Hi can you tell me the exact photoshop you use? Like Lightroom or something else? And do we need pro for coloring pages? Thank you!
Sure - Photoshop for retouching the images and InDesign for creating my manuscript. You will need a license for Midjourney in order to sell books with Midjourney created images in, that is $30 per month.
Thank you kindly for your quick reply! I can’t wait to watch the rest of your videos ❤
Hi, is adobe photoshop the only software available to clean up the images?, Thanks
Any photo editing software should be ok! But photoshop is the best
Good Day, those images generated by MID Journey are visible by others, don't you afraid that someone will use it ?
They don’t have rights to, so they do so at their own risk. Also, i retouch my images and improve them from midjourney, so they are a better version of the pages as well :)
@@selfpublishingempire Yes they don't have rights, but I am more care about Amazon , they first block and next ask ;) (or not)
Good video
Thanks!
Is there a way to bundle multiple kdp books together? Like if I were to make two books that I want to sell together, is there a way to do it?
You can do this for kindle by making a boxset, but not really for paperbacks on KDP. You could look at making a series, but they still exist separately, and a series is designed more for high content.
Coloring books are considered stationary. You can create a series, but not bundles. Prose works can be bundled.
@innovationcurious is such small changes are enough to copyright AI generated art? Based on your latest video?
No, that's not the point of retouching the images. These images are created on a paid subscription with midjourney, meaning I/Midjourney co-own the copyright, allowing me to publish these in coloring books... the purpose of the retouching is to make better pages.
You are not working on layers so as not to destroy the original? New to photoshop and wondering
If you want to work on layers that'd be best practice if you then want to adjust them/use them differently in the future. I'm just creating a single flat image so no need to work in layers.
but the ai image is still blur. we need to learn how to enhance the quality first
The ai image isnt blurred if you have a good image and upscale it
@@CraigPriestley even when I upscale them they still look blur. maybe good for coloring books but not for printing as wall art
@@xvzw I don't use it to print wall art, but I do use it for book covers and they look very sharp. So maybe look at the settings, the prompts you're using, make sure the original result from Midjourney is of suitable quality for upscaling (i always check it doesnt look blurred - if it does, go with another option), and also ensure you're upscaling with good software.