Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How-To, and today I'm going to show you how to make stickers
using artificial intelligence – MidJourney, to be specific – and then I'll show you how
to clean up the images that MidJourney gives you in Photoshop, so that you could
potentially sell them or do whatever you wanted with them. All right, let's get started! [Music]
So the first step is to go out to MidJourney.com/home,
and you'll see this screen. You'll want to join the beta right down here,
and then mine says "invite invalid" because I just did this a second ago, but yours should
say "accept invite," so go ahead and click that. I'm going to go ahead and continue to Discord,
and if you don't have a Discord account, you'll have to set one up. So you'll come down here
to Register and make a new one with your email and phone number. If you already have a Discord
account, you can sign in, and I'll just go ahead and do that now because I already have one.
Now, when I was doing research for this video, MidJourney didn't have a free trial anymore.
If you're not able to get a free trial, you're going to have to pay, which is a little expensive,
but you can do a ten dollar per month plan, and everything that each of these plans includes is
right down here, and you can just pause the video to see what you get with each plan.
I do want to mention that with any of the paid plans, you are able to use it for commercial use,
meaning that you can sell the images you make on your website, for example.
So now I'm in Discord, I'm going to click on the MidJourney server over here, and then I'm
going to scroll down, and now you can choose a newbies room. I'm going to go to Newbies 33,
and here I can look at other people's prompts and what they've made,
and I can also type my own prompt in here. So to do that, you can click down here in the
bar and type “/” (and that's the same key as the question mark), and then type "imagine,"
space, and then you can type your prompt. Now, you can just type it here in Newbies 33
or wherever you happen to be, but I like to create a new server for my prompts,
and that way you can just see your prompts instead of everyone's prompts. It can be a
little hard to find your own if you put it in one of these servers, so I'm going to come over here
and add a server (that's the plus button). I'll create my own and choose "For me and my friends,"
and then I'm just going to call this "Anne's server," and I'll create it. And here it is.
Now I'm going to go back to MidJourney. Then you can scroll through,
and most of them have this MidJourney bot right here. I'll click that, and I'm going
to choose "Add to server." I'll come down here and select the server I just made and continue,
and then I'll scroll down and choose "Authorize." And then we'll have to do the "I am human" thing
and "Authorize." So now I can go into that server, and the MidJourney bot should be here. Then I can
do /imagine (space) and type my prompt. Now, when I'm making sticker prompts,
first I enter "sticker," and then we can do descriptive words like "kawaii."
"Kawaii" is a Japanese word, and it means "cute.” So, you could also put "cute" in here and then I'm
going to describe what I want to see, which is a bumblebee on a flower. I want it to be colorful,
and then I'm going to enter a bunch of sticker-type words like "Contour,” “die-cut
sticker," "vinyl sticker," "flat image,” “2D," and there are two types of images: raster and vector.
Raster is like a photograph, it has little pixels in it. The vector is made with math,
so it's much more fluid and cartoony. And so, using that term, MidJourney will know that you
want a cartoon-style. SVG stands for scalable vector graphics, it's kind of like JPEG except
it's for vectors. And then, “white background” and “simple.” I usually add parameters to my
stickers if I don't want to see something, so "--no" everything after the word "no" will make
MidJourney NOT give me these things. So, if I don't want text, I'll just put "--no text."
Let's try that. Okay, and here's what we’ve got. Now, you might notice this "--s 250," and that is
a stylize parameter. If you have a low number here, it'll produce images that closely match
a prompt but are less artistic. And if you have a high number, you're going to get more artistic
images that maybe don't match the prompt as well. Now, I didn't type this in, it just showed up,
and that is because it's in my settings set up that way. So, I'm going to hit /settings,
and I'll hit enter or return twice, and here is where the style is set. So, if I put it on style
high, that will give me the --s 250 right here. You can see it right here. If I change to very
high, that'll change it to --s 750. For stickers, I found that style high is very good, so the "--s
250." I'm going to dismiss this and now I'll try another one. I want a little pony with a tutu, and
these are the four variations that MidJourney gave me. Now, I'm really liking this one, and you'll
see these buttons under here, these correspond to these, so this is 1, 2, 3, and 4. If you click U1,
you're going to get an upscaled version of this. The "U" means upscaled and then Versions. If I
click V1, I'll get four different versions of this image, and they'll be slightly different. So,
let's go ahead and upscale this. The reason you would want to upscale is that if you use this
size, it will not print very well, it's too small, and it'll be blurry. So, you need to have a much
larger image, especially if you're putting this on a print-on-demand website. Some of the stickers
and other things they offer are really huge, so it needs to be large enough to print well. Okay,
and here is the upscaled image. I'm going to click this, and then I'll choose "Open in browser,"
and now I'm going to right-click it and "Save image as," and I'll just save it on my desktop.
Now we need to make it even bigger, and to do that, we'll need to go to an external
site that just does upscaling. The one that I like is called "Big JPEG," and you can just
go to https://bigjpg.com/ and this is totally free. So the first step, we're going to select
the image we just downloaded. I put that on my desktop, so here it is. And then I'll click Start
for the image type I want: artwork, because this is a more vector look. If you have a pixely one,
you'll want photo. And then for upscaling, I'm going to choose 4X. If you want 8 or 16,
you have to pay for that, I think. And then for noise reduction, I'll choose Medium, and
I'll say Okay. And it'll take some time. Okay, so now it's ready to download. I'll just click that,
and it will go into my downloads. Now we'll bring it into Photoshop and clean it up. I'm going to
click and drag it onto my Photoshop icon. Now, on most print-on-demand websites, they add this
white outline for you, so you'll want to actually get rid of that unless they specifically want you
to add it on. But I definitely like that it's there because it makes it very easy to select
what I don't need. So I'm going to hit W on my keyboard to get my magic wand tool, and I'm just
going to select this gray out here. I want to make sure that contiguous right here is selected,
and you can see I've got all this gray, but it didn't get this. So I'm just going to go
ahead and choose Select > Modify > Expand, and we'll put this out at about 10 pixels,
and we'll say okay. And that got it somewhat. It looks like I need to go a little further,
so I'll do Select > Modify > Expand, and this time I'll go with 40 pixels. That should put us
into the white somewhat. Okay, and it did. I'm going to expand it even more, maybe another 30.
Okay, so now we have... if I zoom out, you can see we've got all the gray out here,
and we're cutting into that white outline, which is what we want. Now I'm going to
hit D on my keyboard to get a black foreground color and a white background, and then I'll hit
delete. Now I'll choose that background color of white. You can also just choose white down here.
Okay, and that pretty much did it. I see a few little spots I need to clean up. I'll hit E to
get to my eraser tool. I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller. I'm doing that by
holding Ctrl+Option and dragging to the right and left. On a PC, you can right-click and hold Alt,
I believe, and then drag to the right and left to increase or decrease your
brush size. I'm just going to get rid of these, maybe smooth this out a little bit.
When you zoom in really close, it looks pretty nice,
so the upscalers did a good job. I don't like this eyelash right here. It doesn't look quite right,
so I'm going to use my pen tool. I'm going to come up here and make sure this is on “Path.”
I want to just cut this off right about here. So I'm going to start up here, click once,
and I'm just going to click and drag to get the shape I want eventually.
Hold Option or Alt and click that to get rid of that handle, and then I'll just click all the way
out here because I want that gone too, and then I'll complete the shape. I'll come over here to
my Paths panel, and I'm just going to double-click this, rename it, and so now I have path one here,
and then I can hold Command and click that to select it [CTRL click on pc]. Now,
if I click back on my layers, I can see I only have the one layer. So when I hit delete here
and I fill it with white, it should just cut out that piece, but it did the opposite which I don't
want. So I'm going to undo with Command + Z or Control + Z. I'm going to hit Shift + Command + I
to get the inverse of my selection (that's Shift + Control + I on a PC), and then I'll do
it again. I'll hit delete and choose white, and now it looks good like it should look. I'll hit
Command + D or Ctrl + D so I don't have that selection anymore, and then I'm just going to
go ahead and come around and just kind of clean this up. And I'll do this one with my brush tool.
Now, if you're not getting the color you want, hit X to switch your foreground and
background (that's these two), so if you hit X, this is what's going to happen over here.
Okay, so it's looking pretty good. I'm going to hit W again (that's my magic wand). I'm just going
to click. I can see a couple of little dots here, so I'm going to increase my tolerance to about 50.
I'll hit Command + D or Ctrl + D to deselect, and then I'll try again with my magic wand,
and it looks like I have everything. I can see some little places I missed, but the magic wand
tool has selected those too, and then I'll hit delete on my keyboard and fill with white. Now,
I'm going to inverse my selection with Shift + Ctrl + I or Shift + Command + I,
so now I only have the pony selected. I'll hit Command + J or Ctrl + J to put it on
a new layer with no background. I'm going to go ahead and throw my background layer away,
and now we can see we have a transparent background. I'm going to delete the extra
pixels outside of the pony, and to do that, I'm going to just crop. So I'll hit C on my keyboard
to get the crop handles up, and then I'll hold Option or Alt and just bring this pretty close,
and I'll also bring the sides in. That looks pretty good. I'll hit Enter or Return to commit
the changes. Okay, so let's see how big this is going to be. I'll go to Image > Image Size,
and now I'm going to change this to inches. I don't want to resample the artwork,
so now when I change this to 300, it will update my width and height. So this is going to be able
to print at 9.6 by 11.8 inches at a really nice resolution. It's not going to be blurry
or anything like that, and so this is perfect. And I'll say okay, and now I'll save this as a
transparent PNG. So we'll go to File > Export > Export As, and I'll change my format to PNG.
Make sure transparency is checked, and then Export, and I'll just save it to my desktop.
So now we're done. Now I can upload this to print-on-demand sites, and honestly,
I'd probably clean it up a little more if I was actually going to do that, like I don't like how
the outline looks here. I don't like what's going on over here or here, but after you get it all the
way you want it, it would be ready to upload. Now, I do want to mention that before you upload to
print-on-demand sites, make sure that they accept artificial intelligence designs because there's a
little bit of controversy surrounding it right now, and you don't want to break any of their
terms and conditions. Alright, I hope this video is helpful for you. If you want to see more videos
like this, just hit the Subscribe button and the little bell next to it, and you'll be notified
every time a new video comes out. Alright, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!