While 120 a month is a lot, I am sure you will make your money back. I also think the privacy option is very important.

Still haven't tried midjourney, one day I will.

Happy to see you are enjoying ai.

The sales will come and bring a nice balance to your video sales.

Plus...everything you learn now you will be able to use when ai video comes.

"AI" (sophisiticated theft/pattern re-arrangement) video already exists (not necessarily that great, but does exist).

Creating prompts really doesn't require all that much skill. It's actually pretty simple.

It's just (in some ways) very time consuming - because "everyone" is doing it - so there are a flood of images/content/etc. And for now- the post processing (if one chooses not to skip that - many do) - is also time consuming.

Quote from: cobalt on November 06, 2023, 02:16

While 120 a month is a lot, I am sure you will make your money back. I also think the privacy option is very important.

Still haven't tried midjourney, one day I will.

Happy to see you are enjoying ai.

The sales will come and bring a nice balance to your video sales.

Plus...everything you learn now you will be able to use when ai video comes.

Is there anything else other than Midjourney to generate usable stock photos?

Shutterstock "AI"?

Quote from: cobalt on November 06, 2023, 02:16

While 120 a month is a lot, I am sure you will make your money back. I also think the privacy option is very important.

Still haven't tried midjourney, one day I will.

Happy to see you are enjoying ai.

The sales will come and bring a nice balance to your video sales.

Plus...everything you learn now you will be able to use when ai video comes.

Is there anything else other than Midjourney to generate usable stock photos?

adobe firefly, dall-e or stable diffusion. Plus a few others.

There are several apps or websites that uses these engines

But midjourney is by far the best quality.

I am just being very stubborn, at some point I will probably try midjourney.

For illustrations it looks like the new dall e 3 is very good, but it is not yet available for me in my openlabs account.

Quote from: blvdone on November 06, 2023, 08:13

Quote from: cobalt on November 06, 2023, 02:16

While 120 a month is a lot, I am sure you will make your money back. I also think the privacy option is very important.

Still haven't tried midjourney, one day I will.

Happy to see you are enjoying ai.

The sales will come and bring a nice balance to your video sales.

Plus...everything you learn now you will be able to use when ai video comes.

Is there anything else other than Midjourney to generate usable stock photos?

adobe firefly, dall-e or stable diffusion. Plus a few others.

There are several apps or websites that uses these engines

But midjourney is by far the best quality.

I am just being very stubborn, at some point I will probably try midjourney.

For illustrations it looks like the new dall e 3 is very good, but it is not yet available for me in my openlabs account.

Midjourney is the only usable AI stock photo generator now.  I think Adobe should buy Midjourney.

It does make me happy, but it�s a hobby, just like painting. Results are similar as well:  Only about 5% of my images sell at all and I can�t predict which ones.
 
From my very limited experience, one AI image results in $5 of total downloads , if it sells at all. All of my best sellers are paint-overs or png. I don�t know how customers tell the difference between straight AI and my paint-overs, but somehow they obviously do.

I was quite disappointed in my income and thought I was doing quite terrible until my account was featured on top sellers list. That depressed me even more, since it shows that my images are selling �well�

I would say if you are a student, retired, stay at home mom/dad,  or live in low income country - then it�s worth it to play stock lottery. I live in area where studio apartment is $3k per month. I can�t see how making less than $5 per hour is feasible.

One will have to produce a lot of AI output to earn a living. You definitely need a pro subscription for that plus Adobe PS or Lightroom subscription. Don�t spend your money on Topaz, you can upscale in PS now with similar results.

$60 pro subscription comes with a private mode. I don�t find prompting easy. Yes, you can generate easy stuff easy - but there are already millions of similar images out there. I had to pay for MJ academy to learn how to prompt and I still can�t produce upscaled results that are �good� quality. You are right, if you zoom in, they all look like crap, yet customers are buying them� must be downscaling them for web. (After we spend time upscaling them to look like crap 😂)

Go to Insights > My statistics. You have several types of reports (Activity, Best Sellers etc) and you can choose the period for which to see the stats.

Quote from: blvdone on November 04, 2023, 08:55

regular photos I shot on cameras.  Anybody else feel the same?
I pay $120/month on Midjourney and also bought Gigapixel AI to create those AI photos.  So, it's a confirmation that what I'm doing is working for me.  That doesn't mean I stop shooting stock photos with my camera, but it's good to see people are actually buying my AI generated photos.

At AS - how can you see which images sell? I don't think one can see all the individual images one have sold like on other agencies?

If you click on "View my Statistics" on the far right above your sales graph on the Dashboard page it will show you the amount you've made from each image you've sold during whatever time frame you've entered on the top left (i.e. "this month," "this week," or a date range you've entered. You can't see how many times an image has sold in that time but you can see how much you've made. You can enter up to a year in the time frame and then print/print to pdf pages and pages of what's sold for that year. You can also enter a time frame in the past (only one year at a time) and compare your best sellers from year to year. It's not the most helpful statistical set up but with a little work you can see how you're doing.

Re AI:

When I checked my recent sales, my first AI image sold this past week*. I've uploaded a few dozen in the past 2-3 weeks and have 29 on sale so far, with another 10 awaiting review. Right now my photographs are selling much better than my AI images but I figure it's a skill I should learn.

It's easy to generate thousands of images, but time-consuming to post-process and keyword them. And a lot of what looked good at first glance needs way too much work upon further inspection.

One thing I'm really enjoying is how I start with one concept and it sparks new ideas so I go off in a completely different direction. It also gets me thinking about things I want to set up and shoot with my camera and it's making me think it's time to dig out the easel in my attic and start painting again, or perhaps easier, really learn how to take advantage of the tools in Photoshop and Adobe Fresco. Although I've used a Wacom Bamboo Tablet & now a Xencelabs one for years to post-process photographs and sometimes add digital painting, there is so much more available than the limited tools I was using. It seems weird to be trying out all these new amazing brushes to post-process stuff that started out as AI. I think it might get me back to drawing and painting - from scratch.

*The 99 cents I made won't even buy me a cup of coffee here in NY. 

Just got my first higher price AI photo sale today.  I got $4.29.  Nice!!

I still haven't tested uploading my own images to have them modified with ai.

That will be important going forward, to create content with camera that can be modified later.

Yes, but you should first check to see if the images you upload are going to be used for further training. Because if so, you are giving them away for free (or, rather, in exchange for the transformations you get from the software) for training further AI algorithms and services. If this happens or not, depends entirely on the service you are going to use. From what I know about the softwares/services I currently use:

- If you use Stable Diffusion on your local machine, and do inpainting, obviously no one else has acces to your images. I believe this is the safest choice you have right now.
- ChatGPT aka DALL-E aka OpenAI states that user-uploaded content is not utilized to train or refine its models, so this could be a safe choice too.
- Adobe clearly states that they use all user-generated input to train their algorithms, as long as you upload the images on their serves. That is if you use Adobe Firefly, or even if you use Photoshop and save the images in the cloud, and not on your own computer, they will use them for further training. You can opt out of this if you disable Content Analysis from your Adobe Account (which is opted in by default), but in their own words "This setting does not apply in certain limited circumstances". I would stay away from this.
- I'm not sure about Midjourney and how they use the images you provide, but with them you can only upload an image to have it described, not modified. So it's not a valid option for transforming your own images. At least for now.

I'm sure there are a ton of other softwares and services that you could use, but my experience is limitted to the ones above. In any case, read the Terms and Conditions before even considering uploading an image.

...

- Adobe clearly states that they use all user-generated input to train their algorithms, as long as you upload the images on their serves. That is if you use Adobe Firefly, or even if you use Photoshop and save the images in the cloud, and not on your own computer, they will use them for further training. You can opt out of this if you disable Content Analysis from your Adobe Account (which is opted in by default), but in their own words "This setting does not apply in certain limited circumstances". I would stay away from this.

- ...

 In any case, read the Terms and Conditions before even considering uploading an image.

Yikes! I've been thinking that when the free Adobe PS/LR I have from Adobe Stock runs out, I might just go for the $20/mo with the 1TB storage to make it easier to move between Fresco & PS - although I can do it with iCloud - but if they can access the stuff I've got in their cloud, no way will I do it since with 1TB I'd obviously use it for non-stock backup too. It's bad enough that they've trained it on my stock photos, but I don't want them using my fine art or of course any personal family photos, which are often mixed in the same folders with photos from travel or hikes that I've taken primarily for stock or fine art and of course are organized in my LR Catalog. My files should be private, bad enough everything that's for sale or to be licensed is already accessible to unscrupulous web scrapers, but stuff I've purposely kept off the web should not be used for AI training. No way can they even argue that's "ethical."

Thanks so much for the head's up!

Quote from: cobalt on November 20, 2023, 05:48

I still haven't tested uploading my own images to have them modified with ai.

That will be important going forward, to create content with camera that can be modified later.

Yes, but you should first check to see if the images you upload are going to be used for further training. Because if so, you are giving them away for free (or, rather, in exchange for the transformations you get from the software) for training further AI algorithms and services. If this happens or not, depends entirely on the service you are going to use. From what I know about the softwares/services I currently use:

- If you use Stable Diffusion on your local machine, and do inpainting, obviously no one else has acces to your images. I believe this is the safest choice you have right now.
- ChatGPT aka DALL-E aka OpenAI states that user-uploaded content is not utilized to train or refine its models, so this could be a safe choice too.
- Adobe clearly states that they use all user-generated input to train their algorithms, as long as you upload the images on their serves. That is if you use Adobe Firefly, or even if you use Photoshop and save the images in the cloud, and not on your own computer, they will use them for further training. You can opt out of this if you disable Content Analysis from your Adobe Account (which is opted in by default), but in their own words "This setting does not apply in certain limited circumstances". I would stay away from this.
- I'm not sure about Midjourney and how they use the images you provide, but with them you can only upload an image to have it described, not modified. So it's not a valid option for transforming your own images. At least for now.

I'm sure there are a ton of other softwares and services that you could use, but my experience is limitted to the ones above. In any case, read the Terms and Conditions before even considering uploading an image.

Very important points, thank you! I hadn�t thought about that.

Many people modify client images with ai software.

Everybody should pay attention to that.

Quote from: blvdone on November 20, 2023, 10:55

Thanks!!  Just got my 2nd higher price AI photo sale at $3.30 just now!!

You will see double digits, for sure. Maybe not very often, but they are so nice to see. I'm still waiting for a triple digits single gen-AI sale...

Wow.  That's nice!!

I'll think there might be a smol bug in your calculation.