Pixiv Inc. and Preferred Networks(PFN), Inc. have started a trial provision of “Petalica Paint for Manga,” an automatic manga coloring service using AI technology, for corporations on May 28, 2021.

Since November 2019, Pixiv and PFN have formed a business alliance and jointly created this service. It aims at developing a new service that makes creative activities fun. Using deep learning, which is one of the features of AI ​​technology, “Petalica Paint” wants to implement automatic line drawing, coloring in the field of automatic illustration services.

Currently, colored manga is the standard in new overseas manga culture, and with time the coloring market is becoming more active with digitalization. In the Japanese manga industry as well, due to internationalization and overseas expansion, They have started to prefer sending out more and more color pages. But issues such as the high level of specialized skills required for coloring work and coloring costs are some major problems.

“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 monochrome manuscripts with reference to colored character images. After automatic coloring, it has a function that divides elements such as “hair, clothes, skin, eyes, and background” into layers and it exports them as the industry standard “Adobe Photoshop image format data (PSD)”.

Pixiv’s in-house product comparison guarantees, that by using this service, the work time will shorten by 50% or more compared to manual coloring. Furthermore, with this service the uniformity of work quality is promoted, so that creators can improve the quality of their work drastically.

Right now, the special site of Petalica lets users upload images or color a sample image for free to test out the usefulness of the service. In the future, the company aims to provide more features and advantages to individual users by making use of the technology it has cultivated after the official version is released.

Pixiv and PFN intend to create an environment where Japanese manga can be developed across various regions and languages ​​for the development of the Japanese industry.

More about this service: Petalica Paint

Source: AnimeAnimeBiz