Make Money Selling AI Images From MidJourney

Hey, Matt Wolfe here. Do you want to know how to generate income selling AI generated art? Well, you can actually do that using Adobe stock. So in the last 30 days or so, I generated just shy of $50 off of about 54 images that I generated with AI. Now you might be wondering, can you sell AI generated images on stock photo websites? Well, Adobe actually does allow it. So if I actually look over at Adobe's terms of service over here, they actually have a section on generative art. And if I scroll down here, I will save time and show you what they say about the do's and don'ts. It says, do check your submissions carefully to make sure the anatomy of your content is intended and relevant. Do use generative AI tools to create work that fills content needs within a collection. Do select only images which provide unique value to the collection. They don't want you to use prompts that capitalize on other people's work or depict subjects or locations in ways that may mislead buyers. They don't want you to submit multiple variations that came from the exact same prompt. Now, other than those rules, you are allowed to submit generative art on Adobe stock. And so I've been doing that and I started on, well, roughly around December 5th. This is the week of December 5th. I'm not sure exactly which day I started on. I'm recording this today on January 8th. And you can see in that period of time, I've generated about 4,778 off of 54 images. So there are a few things that you need to do in order to be able to do this right. Images have to be upscaled. You can't just pull them right out of mid journey and then upload them to Adobe stock. The file sizes will be too small. Small. So they do need to be upscaled. That's one thing. Also, you're going to want to upload stuff that's actually relevant that will get purchased. There's a little trick that if you want to figure out what's going to get purchased that I use and this is how I do it. So you're going to want to create a contributor account on Adobe stock. So to do that, go to stock.adobe.com Once you get here, scroll all the way down to the bottom and there's a little link that says Sell images. Click on the Sell Images link. Click join now and create an account. Be able to sell stock images. It's totally free. Anybody can do it. Just create an account and you'll be ready to go to sell. Stock images. I already have an account so I'm not going to go ahead and create another one. You've already seen inside of my account. So here's what I do to find images to generate. Now they actually have a section inside of the Adobe stock area called Insights. If you click on the Insights up at the top will actually show you the recent top sellers for various date ranges. So right now as I'm recording this, January 2nd to January 8th is the, you know, previous week and it's showing me the best sellers. And you can see stuff like both sitting in front of a computer, people looking at a laptop, people high fiving, you know, workplace type photos. We could see digital type photos with this data, digitalization type stuff and fingers typing on keyboards and things like that. Smiley faces, people holding stuff in their hands. More sort of like workplace photos here. Some stuff that looks like it represents, you know, clean energy. Some stuff that represents the start of 2023. We've got some background style images here. You've got, you know, smoke and fire and things that can be used as backgrounds. Some images to represent the new. Some plant images with growth representing green energy. So you can start to find themes of what's actually getting used right now on Adobe stock and what people are having success with. So this is all of the stuff under the photos section. Then you can click on illustrations, get some more ideas in here. You've got some interior design illustrations, some T shirt art, some various colorful stuff. This stuff looks like it might even be generative art itself. You've got some trees, some interior shots with, you know, bricks and cool lighting, a lot more background. The backgrounds are really easy to do. You know, look at this. You can even see that they put abstract and background as some of the keywords that they're using. So you can get a lot of ideas by clicking through and looking at what some of the top sellers are. And then you can do similar stuff, just go and prompt some of it in mid journey. Let's go back to the photos. I saw some cool stuff down here that I thought I might want to try myself. So if I scroll down here, you've got some of this stuff where it's like a brain and a book and a light bulb and a hand. Some of this kind of stuff would be really cool with generative art. So what I like to do is I can click into some of these. Let's click on this one with the hand holding the brain and the cogs. And this you can see here is the description education as A window to new discoveries and scientific inventions. Art collage. Scroll down here. You can see, here's the keywords, some similar keywords that were used to create this image. Collage, art, education, learn, research, all of this kind of stuff. All of this is good data, good intel that you can use for your prompting. So let's go open mid journey here. This is my mid Journey bot inside of Discord. And let's go ahead and prompt. Imagine a hand holding a brain with books behind it, light bulb, cogs, collage. And then let's go aspect ratio 3, 2, to get this sort of wider image and let's see what it generates for us. All right, so we got some interesting images here. We got a hand holding a light bulb that kind of looks like a brain with some books and side of it. We've got a funky hand. We don't want anything with these, like, disfigured hands. Here's another one that's like a hand, but if you look at it, it's got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 fingers. So the best out of these ones is probably this one. It looks like a normal hand. Maybe there's some extra fingers there, but kind of hard to say, but a hand holding a light bulb with a brain in it. That one's kind of cool. Let's go ahead and upscale that one there. While we're waiting for that, I'm going to start prompting another one. This time I'm not going to use a hand because we all know that AI art at this point isn't great at hand. So I'm going to eliminate the hand portion of it. Let's do a colorful collage with books, cogs, a brain, light bulb, Just add some extra keywords and see what it gives us. Intelligence, learning, education. Let's go aspect ratio 3, 2. And let's go ahead and try that prompt. It'll give us a sort of similar style, but without the goofy hand thing going on. Okay, so these all look really, really cool. I like these a lot. I like this top left one. And since these two are very dissimilar to each other, we could probably actually use multiple of these. I'm not going to use this one just because it's got this, you know, funky text. I do really like the colors. I'm kind of bummed that put the text in here. I could pull this into Photoshop or something and fix it. But for the sake of this demonstration, not really worth the time. But I do like this one here with an open book, a colorful brain, You've got some cogs, a light bulb. This represents like education equals intelligence. And then I also really like this one. It looks like a, you know, the silhouette of a child's head. Books and cogs and light bulbs and all sorts of stuff. So I can upscale both of these. They're not super similar to each other. So I think, you know, we can get away with using both of these as stock images. So I'm going to upscale number one and I'm going to upscale number four. Now our image here, you can tell we got some funky fingers going on now that it's been scaled up a little bit. So let's go ahead and do the beta upscale, redo. Let's have it, take another shot at it. All right, so let's take a peek. You can see the fingers actually look a little bit better this time. Let's go ahead and use this one. I think the hands are probably good enough that they're not too much of an issue. Yeah, I say let's go ahead and use this one. So I'm going to open it in the browser, save image as, and then I actually have a folder on my desktop that I call stock photos that when these are ready, I save them there. All right, let's see what else it generated. So now it upscaled these other two that we had it upscale for us. This looks good to me. So I'm going to go ahead and open this in the browser, save this image here. Let me go ahead and open this last one in the browser as well and save my image to my stock photos. And let's try to find one more idea and then I'll show you what the next phase is. Let's take a peek in the illustration section this time and let's generate just some really cool looking backgrounds. A lot of these can be used as, you know, desktop backgrounds or something of that nature. And let's just generate a couple cool background images. So I'm going to jump, jump back into mid journey. Let's go imagine a colorful abstract art, paint, splatter, desktop background. I'm just going to type in desktop background and see if it actually generates something that looks like a desktop background. And then once again, let's go aspect ratio 3, 2 to get the wider aspect ratio. And let's go ahead and generate that and see what it comes up with for us. And let's go ahead and create one more here, a colorful abstract background. Let me get some inspiration over here. So here's some more backgrounds. Take a peek at this one here, vibrant depiction of the contrast between fire and ice wallpaper. Cold blue frozen ice melting over hot red fire. So this is like a high fire and ice contrast. So here's the desktop backgrounds with the color splatter that it gave me. This top left one I think is pretty awesome. Let's go ahead and upscale that one. Let's finish this prompt here. A colorful abstract background representing contrast between fire and ice. Blues, reds, oranges. And then let's just go aspect ratio 3, 2 once more. This will be the last one that we pull for our desktop background. And I'll show you the next step after this. Okay, so these came out pretty cool. I'm actually torn between a couple of them. I really like all three of these. Not a huge fan of this bottom right one. I don't really like this solid line down the middle. But these three all look really cool. I think. I think I'm leaning towards this top right one as being my favorite. So let's go ahead and upscale number two here. All right, so let me go ahead and download our paint splatter here. Save image as. Save that one to our stock photos of our fire and ice image here. Save this to our stock photos. Cool. Now, I've got five different images here. Let's kind of take a peek at them again. We've got this background image, the color paint splatter. We've got our fire and ice image. We've got our, you know, child with books and cogs and the brain. We've got a book opening with a brain, colorful stuff coming out of it. And then we've got our hand holding a light bulb with books and all that good stuff inside of it. Now, one thing that they don't like on the stock photo sites is when you have these little borders on the edge. If you look real close, there's kind of this little border here. We're going to need to remove those. So I'm going to go ahead and just quickly crop it in this photos app here. So if I come up here, you know, use whatever you would normally use to crop an image. I need to make sure it stays the same aspect ratio. Select 3, 2 for the aspect ratio. And I'm going to just kind of crop in ever so slightly on the edges here, just so it gets rid of any borders that are hanging out on the edge. And there. Now you can see that it's got real clean edges. We move on to the next one. Going to do this real quick on this one. Set my aspect ratio to 3, 2. To maintain it and then so slightly, just to make sure that there are no borders around the edges. Now we got clean lines on this one. This one's already got clean lines. Don't need to do it. This one's got a little edge. Might as well just do it to be safe. Ever so slightly. Now we got clean lines on the edge of this one. And then finally, this one's got some lines on it that I need to make sure I remove as well. Select my aspect ratio, bring it in, bring it in a little bit and save it. Now you can see my edges are nice and clean. There's no borders or anything like that. So now I've got these five images. But if I look at the images, if I check out the properties on it and look at the details, you can see it's 1521 by 1014. These image dimensions, 1521 by 1014. That's not large enough for Adobe to accept these images, so I have to upscale them. Personally, I use this program called Topaz as photo from Gigapixel. It's an AI upscaler. And the reason I like this app, it is a premium app, you do have to pay for it. But I can literally drag all of these over, drop all five of them in, and upscale them all in one shot, right? So I can just click save five images here. And what it's going to do is it's going to upscale all of these images. I'm going to go to the top quality here. Just click save and you'll see it's just going to, one at a time, upscale them. And this is what I really like. You can see it's upscaling them to 4235 by 2823. So. So it's really, really bringing the size up on these images. And it uses AI to make sure that the quality is maintained on them. Now, if I close this window, this will actually like show me the before and after. So you can see that the resolution on this, this is really zoomed in on the original. This is really zoomed in on the new one. You can see that it actually maintained a lot of the detail in here where the original one was starting to look pixelated. These ones have nice clean edges. And I could look at any of my images. You can see this is zoomed in of the original and it's real pixelated. On this new one, when I zoo in, it's real clean edges. And this one just does it in bulk, which I really like. But again, this is a premium product. You do have to purchase it. If you want to find that product specifically. You can come over to future tools here. Come up to Image Improvement. That one was the AI Gigapixel upscaler. So if I click over to this one and take a peek, just so you know what this costs, it costs 100 bucks one time ever. And you can do that bulk uploading. Now, if you don't want to spend the money, there are free alternatives. If I jump back over here to future tools, make sure I have Image Improvement selected. Let me just type upscale and you can see there's seven different upscale tools in here that you can choose from. And if I want to, I can do, let me check. Free and freemium, right? The freemium ones you can actually use for free. So you have AI Image Upscaler, Clip Drop, let's Enhance, Cutout Pro and Nero Image Upscaler. The free one that I tend to use the most is just this AI image upscaler can click in here, visit this page and then I use this one all the time as well. Let me open up my stock photos up here and you can see I've got the originals and the upscaled ones here. Let me change my view so you can see which ones are which. You can see the upscaled ones. It added this little up to the end of them. So we've got this one here and this is the un upscaled one. Let's go ahead and take this image and let's drop it into this free upscaler. I can literally just take it, drag it and drop it. Now, this tool works really, really well, but you have to do every single image one at a time, which is why I use the other one because I can just drag and drop and bulk throw a bunch of them in. So you can see over on the right side. I drag over the various parts of it, the difference between the original and the upscaled version. And then what I like to do is I like to turn on this enhanced quality because I think it actually makes a pretty big difference. Now let's take another peek. Let's zoom in here. You can see the original on the left, the new version on the right. And you can just see how much cleaner those lines are. Look around the edges is that's where it gets real apparent. It's the lines just get a lot cleaner when you enhance it. So this is the new one. I can download this image and here's an upscaled version that is good enough for me to upload to Adobe stock. All right, so now I've got my images created, I've got them upscaled, and now they're ready for Adobe stock. Let's jump back over to Adobe Stock, jump into our account, click on upload files, and then I'm going to go ahead and sort these by date because the upscaled ones will all be towards the top here. These are the five that I've upscaled. So I'm just going to take all five of these, drag them and drop them into Adobe Stock stock. And now they're all in Adobe stock, but we haven't submitted them yet. We actually have to give them all titles and give them keywords and tags. What I'm going to do is I'm going to come back over to this Insights tab and we've got some of these Brain Knowledge ones and let's see some of the keywords that they were using. So let's click on this hand holding the brain. I don't want to use the same title, but I do want to kind of get some inspiration from the keywords that they were using down here. So let's jump back over under file type. This is an illustration and not a photo. Category is let's leave it as technology keywords in English under recognizable people or property. We can click no because there's nothing recognizable about these. These are all our images. Now our title. We can get creative, put a few keywords that we want it to show up for in here. Let's put knowledge in the palm of your hand. Then I'll add some extra keywords. Illustration, education, collage. And now we're going to come down to keywords. It's going to some keywords. So let's go ahead and go. Bulb, energy, Electricity, Idea, Light bulb, electric, Bright Concept, Innovation, Invention, Light bulb Technology, Creativity, Inspiration, Ideas, illuminated. Let's go Education, books, cogs, Understanding, intelligence, science. Go STEM and add a bunch of keywords. And now this file is ready to submit. So let's go ahead and click Submit one file, click Submit again, and that one is now submitted for approval. And it usually takes three or four days before they approve it. And if they don't approve it, it will tell you why. Right. So I've got some in here that I made that aren't approved. And it's trying to tell me that I need to do a property release. Like this is a real person, but it's not a real person, it's AI Art. So I just haven't resubmitted them. I haven't bothered yet. But they will tell you what you need to do in order to get them approved. Let's go back over new. I've got these ones. Let's go ahead and update one of these background images. We'll change the file type to illustration, category, graphic, resources, recognizable property. No, let's go the contrast between fire and ice, Desktop, background. And then I kind of want to add Yin Yang because it's kind of got that Yin Yang thing going on. Illustration. All right. And then we'll come down, add some keywords. Fire, flame, abstract, red, hot, burn, heat, burning, orange, black, smoke, light, dark, water, danger, yellow. Yep, all these pretty much work. Inferno, wood, energy, glow, yin yang, ice, blend, swirl. And then that's probably good. So now I've got this one. I'll go ahead and submit the one file and then I'm just going to go through and do it for the rest of them. And that is pretty much the whole process. You just wait for them to get accepted. And if I come back here, you could see that's pretty much what I've done. I've been keeping an eye on the insight section to see what types of stuff is selling and generating images based on what is hot and what is selling right now. And when I generated some of these, you could see I was generating some during winter. I made a lot of business images of business people shaking hands because business photos do real well in stock photo sites. A lot of these haven't had downloads, but I was making more images like the ones that did work this heart up here. Here got two downloads. People seem to like that one. So I, you know, made some more variations of similar ones. I've done some health images, some snowy landscape images right around Christmas. And you know, most of them are probably never going to sell, never going to get downloaded, but if you do enough of them and you, you put some volume behind it over time, you'll get some that really do well. And again, if I just do lifetime here, you can see the lifetime of this whole account is only a few weeks. Weeks done, almost $50, 23 downloads. One other quick tip before I wrap this one up. There is a site called wirestock.com that I've started messing with a little bit. And what this site does is it will actually upload your files to multiple stock photo sites at once. You can come into Wirestock and you can see that I've uploaded all of those same pretty much same images into Wire stock that I uploaded into Adobe stock. And if I show you my dashboard here, you can see that, you know, because I Just released. I just started doing this recently, but you can see that it added these images to wirestock direct, Shutterstock, pond5, Getty, iStock, dreams, time, deposit photos, Alamy, Adobe and 123rf. So upload the photos just once to this site here. And when you upload a photo, let's. Let's go ahead and grab one of these stock photos that I just made here. Like this Fire and Ice one. Let's go ahead and upload this. What's really cool about this is when you upload it, they actually do all of the titles and tagging and all that kind of stuff for you. So they review it and they update it for you. So let's go ahead and select this one. See, it's got this easy submission. If I turn this off, I can title it and give it categories and descriptions. If I turn this on, they will just go ahead and do all of that for me. I don't need to add a release, I don't need to do anything with it. So just turn on Easy submission, select what sites you want to upload it to. Right now it's, I don't know what these logos are. Since I've already uploaded it to Adobe, I don't want to upload it there again. But I have it set to Shutterstock, Alamy, deposit photos, Getty, Pond 5, dreams, time and these various channels. So it will submit to those places. I can just click submit and it's going to go and submit them all those places for me and it's going to come up with the titles and descriptions and tags and all of that kind of stuff. Really cool. Haven't played with it a whole lot yet. I did upload all these images I've uploaded. Well now 57 images. It's made, you know, $5 so far off of 25 downloads. So it doesn't seem to be doing as well, well for me as just uploading them straight to Adobe stock. But again, I haven't actually been doing it for as long. So I'll link you up to Wirestock. I do have like an affiliate code that if you use it, I think it gives me some like extra credits or something like that. But if you want to try that out, you can try this out as well. And it kind of bulk uploads them and does all a whole bunch of the stuff for you. It saves you a lot of time. But the process up into the point where you actually upload them is going to be the same. You're going to go and look in the insights. See what images work well. Once you find the images, go prompt them in mid journey. Once you've prompted them in mid journey, make sure you crop out any sort of borders that are on it. Then upscale them using either the Gigapixel AI tool or this upscale media website. Once they're all nice and upscaled, go and upload them to whichever stock photo platform that you prefer. Hopefully you found that helpful. 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