In this video, I'm gonna show you how to take an image and remove items,
objects,
people from these images so that you can take something like this and turn it
into something like this.
So you can use these images in the interiors of spot the difference
books. These are kdp low content,
medium content books that you can self-publish on Amazon.
So if that interests you, then follow along. Now,
if you've not been to channel before, then welcome. My name is Paul Marles.
I do videos on how to make it keep it and grow it.
And that's your money I'm talking about. If you do like videos like that,
then please do give it a thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell.
Now this video is a follow on from my previous video where I looked in depth
at this particular niche. We did niche research, keyword research,
and some basic resources for creating the interiors of these types of
books. I'll leave a link to that video down below in the description.
Now we're gonna be using two pieces of software today,
Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. Why? Well,
there are two main types of images. There are vector images.
These come in .ai, .svg and dot .eps format.
And we've got raster images that tend to come in .png and
.jpg or .jpeg format.
Vector images are very easy to edit.
Raster images a little bit more difficult,
but I find them actually more fun and I'll give you a bit more information on
those two different types of images as we come across them. Now,
the techniques I'm gonna show you are very basic and so we'll translate through
to other pieces of software like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop,
or free software like Inkscape or Gimp. Unfortunately,
what I'm gonna show you today,
you can't do in Canva. Okay, so let's get started.
So here we are in Affinity Designer and this is the sort of illustration
which is a typical vector type illustration.
And the advantage of these types of images are that they are made up of
shapes in layers that you can see here on the right hand side to build up an
image like this. Where can we get these types of illustrations? Well,
there are many sites on things like Creative Market and Envato Elements,
designbundles.net.
I tend to get all my images from either Vecteezy or
Creative Fabrica.
Here I found an artist that's created all these different illustrations which
would be perfect for the interiors of spot the difference books. And in fact,
we're going to use one of these illustrations.
And we can see here that they have full print on demand usage allowed.
And that's the advantage of using images from these types of sites. You can
be sure that you do have the commercial license to use them.
And when you look in the description of these types of images,
it'll tell you what format they come in.
And here we can see here it says Vector AI or Adobe Illustrator and eps
files. They also do come as jpeg files as well.
So you've got the choice if you want to use the vector images or the raster
images.
So all you need to do once you've downloaded those images is just literally drag
it into Affinity Designer.
Now the first thing you're going to need to do is to left-click on one corner of
the image and just drag to the opposite corner and create bounding box
around all these different layers.
And then hit command G or control G to group all those layers
together.
And we're going to rename this original. Then we're going to right
click on this group and hit duplicate.
So now we've got our duplicate layer.
Next we're going to untick the original layer at the bottom to make that
invisible.
Go to our copied layer and we're going to hit shift command or
control and G to ungroup, all those layers.
So next we can easily delete any item, object,
people, whatever from the image that we like.
And it's just a case of clicking on a particular aspect of the image.
I'll enlarge that for you and just hitting delete and it's gone.
Now some of the other objects contain multiple layers,
so you can just click on each aspect of an image and just hit delete until it
all disappears.
Now there is a quicker way to do this.
You could drag a bounding box around one of the objects.
However, what you may find is if you try and do that,
you will just end up dragging one of the background components.
So one way to overcome that would be to go over to the layers panel and actually
lock that particular layer.
So now we'll try again and you can see we're now dragging one of the other
background layers. So again,
we'd have to go back and lock that particular layer.
And eventually you'll get to the point where you can create a bounding box
around a component of the image and just hit delete.
And we can do this in all different areas of the image.
So we've got this girl here and I've removed her hat and you can see she looks a
bit strange. So we can actually just click on the hair and move that upwards.
So the next step is to unlock those layers we've just locked,
otherwise the image will end up looking strange.
And then we need to put a bounding box around the whole image.
So top left hand corner, left click of the mouse,
just drag and then command G to group all those layers.
So now we've got two layers or groups.
We've got the original group which has got all the objects present,
and then we've got the group where they've been removed and we'll just rename
that so we don't forget and we'll just call that removed.
And then what you would need to do is to export each of these grouped
layers.
So you'd make the removed one invisible and just click on file export
and you could export this as a png or jpg. When you've done that,
you can then make that layer invisible, make the removed layer visible.
The next sport that again has a .png or .jpg
file.
And so now you've got your two images that you can put inside or on the
page of a book. What you'd also need to do is create a third image,
and this third image would highlight those aspects of the image
that you've removed.
And this would be used in the solutions of the book and it's very simple to do
this. Left and side. Hit the circle tool on your image,
just drag, go to the color box, make sure the fill is invisible,
then select the stroke.
You can change the color of this and you can change the width of the stroke.
You can see how that varies.
And what you can do is just place that over the objects that have been removed
and selecting option and the left click of the mouse,
you can drag identical circles to the other areas that you've removed like so,
and then you can export that as well as a .png or
.jpg file. So you've got the three images that you need.
So next we come onto the raster images.
And for this we're going to be using Affinity Photo.
So the difference between a raster image and a vector image is that a
raster image is made up of pixels so that when you enlarge it,
it degrades and becomes very pixelated.
So we haven't got all those different layers that we can easily delete.
Now the two tools that we're going to be using are the inpainting brush tool
and the clone brush tool.
So we're going to enlarge this and we're going to pick an item to delete.
So we click on the inpainting brush tool and what we can do is just
paint over an object.
In this case it's a person and you can see it automatically disappears.
However the image is not perfect because you can see here some of the lines
don't match up. So now we can go to the clone tool. And what this does,
if you hold down the option key,
you can see that little plus sign and choose a part of the image to copy.
So something like there and then move the clone tool across.
And if you click it will just copy parts of the image like
so. And as you can see, it fixes that area.
Now we'll go to this area at the top here. Again, hold down option,
select an area,
move across and just click or you can paint across.
Now you may find all that doesn't look quite right,
so you can easily just sample a different area. And again,
just go across. And then when you zoom out,
you can see it's barely discernible where the object has been removed.
So you can do this with all different aspects of the image. So let's take this
window here, we'll click on the inpainting brush tool.
It deletes that. It's left some artifacts there. So go to the clone tool,
hold down option or alt, click on an area.
Now you can easily, just with the bracket tool,
decrease and increase the size of your tool. Sometimes if it's too big,
it will bring in other artifacts. So for this case,
we can go smaller and we can just paint down and remove that line there.
And we can do this for any area on the image. We'll take this chimney here.
So inpainting brush tool, it's going to brush over this,
it's gone. That looks pretty good except the roof looks a bit strange.
So what we'll do, clone tool, place it over the edge of the roof
and then just move along, click or just drag and paint.
Now that doesn't look quite right, so we're going to adjust that a bit more.
So I'm going to undo that.
And this time we're gonna go over to the left hand side.
Goin to choose a portion of this roof here. And again,
just move up and along. And I think that looks a lot better.
We can just make sure the sky looks okay.
You can see it's left a little bit of an area there. So again, hold down option,
select a portion of the sky, boom, it's gone.
And so you can do that with all the different objects and areas on the image.
Let's just do this once more with say this statue image here.
This is a bit more of a difficult area.
Now that looks a bit strange because it's placed a pillar over it.
So what you could do is put the tool over it again and see what comes up.
Now that does look a bit better and what we can do is take the clone tool,
sample a portion of the unaltered image,
and then just go across like so.
And we're gonna take some of that there, move that up. Same down bottom here.
It's got some light areas, which I'm going to get rid of. So option,
we'll sample a portion of the darker area and then just move up.
We'll sample some of this. There we go.
So when you zoom out,
it's almost impossible to tell where that statue has been removed.
Once these images go into a book, they'll be, you know,
quite small.
And so it'll be even harder to tell where images have been removed.
Now this is a tool that will take some practice, does require some skill to use.
I may have made it look quite easy there, but once you get into the hang of it,
experimented with various different images,
you'll find some images are easier to edit than others.
You'll soon come to terms with how to do these types of
edits. And again, in the same way with a vector image,
you would export the original image,
you would export the image where we've removed the objects,
and also do an image where you've drawn the little red circles or
blue circles, whatever, around those components that you have removed.
Now if you are new to this whole publishing game,
self-publishing on Amazon via the the KDP platform,
then I do have this book tutorials playlist here,
where it goes through all the different steps of creating books,
publishing them, uploading them to Amazon. Thank you much for your time.
It is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time, goodbye.