Anime Anime Global

Pixib Inc. and Preferred Networks Inc. have launched a trial offering of “Petalica Paint for Manga”, an automatic manga coloring service using AI technology, for corporate customers on May 28, 2021.

Pixib and PFN have been collaborating in the field of automatic illustration coloring since November 2019, with the aim of developing new services that make creative activities more enjoyable, and have been jointly operating Petalica Paint, an automatic line drawing coloring service that uses deep learning, an type of AI technology.

Currently, color comics are the standard in the new overseas manga culture, and the coloring market is becoming more and more active along with digitalization.
The Japanese manga industry is also beginning to internationalize and expand overseas in earnest, but the high level of specialized skills required for coloring work and the cost of coloring are issues that need to be addressed.

“Petalica Paint for Manga,” an automatic manga coloring service based on AI technology developed as a new model of “Petalica Paint,” can automatically color characters on a monochrome manuscript by referring to colored character images. After automatic coloring, it has a function to separate elements such as hair, clothes, skin, eyes, and background into layers and export them as Adobe Photoshop image format data (PSD), which is the industry standard.

By using this service, work time can be reduced by more than 50% compared to manual coloring (*compared to Pixiv’s own products), and since the quality of work is more uniform, creators will be able to concentrate on improving the quality of their work.
In the future, after the release of the official version, Pixiv and PFN plan to use the technology they have developed to offer the service to individual users.

Pixiv and PFN aim to create an environment where manga created in Japan can be developed beyond regions and languages, in order to develop the manga industry in Japan.

[Anime! Anime! Biz / reprinted article from animeanime.biz].