September 3, 2025
Are you interested in coloring book creation? Both children and adults enjoy creative activities, and coloring pages have become increasingly popular in recent years because the creative outlet they offer is perfect for anyone with time and a set of pencils, crayons, or markers. You might be interested in coloring book creation so you can publish a coloring book, but you are looking for the right inspiration to guide you in the process. Kids and adults are drawn to familiar characters like those in popular movies, books, or cartoons, but without the express consent of the owners, using a licensed character isn’t possible.
Instead, you will need to come with your designs to use, but what if you don’t have the artistic ability to create them yourself? A surprisingly easy strategy for coloring book creation for any age audience is to use your photography as a starting point for your designs. With a few adjustments, along with the magic of basic editing tools, you can turn photos that you own the rights to into appealing and engaging art you can collect into a book to sell, gift to give or a gorgeous keepsake to remember special times.
Turning beloved photographs into coloring pages for a gift, to keep for yourself or to sell is not as complicated as it might seem. And with the wide variety of ways you can personalize this type of project, coloring book creation from photos is a project that almost anyone can do.
The first step to take for coloring book creation is to look at how the pages are going to be used. Decide who you are making the coloring pages for so you can make the best decisions about image selection and the difficulty level of the finished coloring pages. The themes of the photographs you use need to appeal directly to the audience who will use them.
Popular coloring pages for children include easily identifiable objects, family members, representations of familiar places or people, as well as events or holidays.
Teenagers and young adults love pages with trendy themes and age-associated imagery focused on friendship, activities, hobbies, and relationships.
Coloring pages for adults can include just about any topic or theme, reflect special relationships with friends, families, or locations, family or trip memories or even simply relaxing or interesting shapes that are fun to bring to life with vivid colors.
You may have a treasure trove of photos ready to use or you may want to create the photographs that you want to use for your coloring book creation. Following a few guidelines will help you make the most of the photos you have, ensuring the final design looks great in your coloring book creation.
Use photographs that you own. While it may be tempting to download a beautiful image you see online, if it is not explicitly labeled as free to download and use, you will need permission from the photographer before you include it in your coloring book creation. Asking friends and family for their pictures is a good way to increase your options if collecting photos for a specific theme, audience, or purpose is challenging.
Consider the audience’s interests. Always keep the end user of the coloring book creation in mind when you consider photos to use in your project.
Look for photos with simple images or ones that you can crop easily. Photos with minimal details can be easily transformed into fun coloring book creation, but a great shot can also be altered to remove extra details or focus in on one element to create the perfect coloring book creation page, too.
Create groupings of photographs that work well together. Try to vary the pictures that you use, combining some detailed, focused photographs with others that include wide-shot backgrounds so your pages can reflect a variety of scenes for your users to enjoy.
How to Choose a Good Photograph. The quality of a photograph is more than just the value of the subject in the picture, but not everyone has a trained photographer’s eye. Picking a great photo for your coloring book creation means focusing on three elements: clarity, lighting and variety.
1 Each photo should be clear and easy to interpret by the viewer. Photographs you are considering should be clear and crisp, not fuzzy or out of focus. The elements in the picture should also have defined edges, allowing you to see each object fully. Look for pictures that have contrasting colors between an object and its background, so objects don’t appear to fade away, making them difficult to transform into a coloring page or hard for a user to determine where an object begins and ends.
2 Quality photographs should have bright, clear lighting so each object in the photo is easy to see and will make a good sketch drawing on the coloring page.
3 Include photos with a variety of perspectives to give you different looks to consider for your coloring book: close-ups, groupings of elements, scenes with multiple objects and backgrounds and cool patterns or backdrops.
Once you have decided on the photos that work best for your audience and your book’s purpose, use a professional editing program to transform them into drawings or sketches that are perfect for the pages of a coloring book creation.
Using Canva: After uploading your photo to Canva, use the desaturate feature to turn it into a grayscale version of the picture, making it easier to transform it into a drawing. To highlight the shapes of objects in the photo, increase the contrast and decrease the brightness controls. Next, apply either the Sketch or Outline filter to the file to complete the transformation of your photograph into a drawing. When the drawing looks the way you like, save it as a high-resolution file so you can ensure that it appears crisp and clean when it is duplicated in your coloring book creation.
Using Adobe Illustrator: For those with advanced skills in graphic design, Adobe Illustrator provides a platform that is more nuanced and can result in drawings with high resolution and excellent detail. After opening your photo file in the program, apply the Image Trace function to turn the picture into a vector outline.
Use Trace to clean up the image and then use the Threshold controls to further refine the image. Raising the Threshold will simplify it by reducing the amount of detail, while decreasing the Threshold will create more details in your picture. Next, expand the image so you can further clean it up, straightening lines and removing stray outline marks. Finally, clean up the completed image using the editing tools within Illustrator to create a coloring page that is crisp and easy to color when it is reproduced.
Selecting the right book layout, shape, paper, and binding are the next steps in coloring book creation from photos.
Layout Options: Consider the formatting of your coloring book pages when you decide between a horizontal or vertical page layout. Landscape printing is perfect for wide, panoramic style pictures, and portrait sizing shows off photos focusing on singular images. Another shape to consider is the square format, a more unusual shape that will stand out on the shelves or become a memorable keepsake.
Book Size: Choose a size with your end user in mind. Coloring books for children should be larger so little hands can navigate detailed work, while books for teens or adults might be large or small, depending on the intricacies of the final designs.
Paper Selection: Paper thickness and treatment matter in a coloring book, so selecting the right one will make each page easy to color and enjoy. Untreated paper provides a smooth, even surface to color on, and paper with a weight of 70-80 lb. offers enough thickness without bulk for a seamless coloring book experience.
Binding and Covers: A professionally crafted coloring book is often bound using Perfect binding, and it comes with a spine that is perfect for a title, message, or text labeling the coloring book. The more expensive option, Perfect binding, also works best for books with between 28 to 40 pages, depending on the thickness of the paper. Gloss or matte covers look great on perfect-bound books, and Publishing Xpress offers cover design expert services to help you craft a cover that will help your book stand out or impress your book recipients.
For coloring books that will lay flat, Wire-O and Plastic Coil bindings are a good choice. These metal ring or coil-bound formats are sturdy and allow users to open up the coloring book to a single page. Covers treated with gloss or matte look beautiful in these binding styles, but they do not come with a spine option.
Smaller coloring books look lovely when saddle-stitch binding is used, which utilizes large staples to bind together folded pages to create a finished book. This budget-friendly option can bind up to around 80 printed pages, depending on paper weight and can also include a treated cover.
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