AI and personalised colouring: how it actually works

JCBy Julien CornilleCo-founder and publication director, Memory Pencil

AI gets talked about a lot, explained rarely. What it really does in the pipeline of a personalised album, and what stays human.

Saying "AI-generated colouring page" doesn't mean much on its own. So here's what AI actually does in our pipeline, at what stage, and how every page is checked before it gets printed.

Step 1: photo prep (mechanical)

Cropping, exposure normalisation, main-subject detection. No generative AI at this stage, just deterministic processing. This is what makes the photo usable for everything that follows.

Step 2: outline extraction (AI model)

A specialised vision model pulls out the main lines from the photo. We use models trained specifically on faces and family scenes, not generic ones. That specialisation avoids the artifacts (misplaced eyes, extra fingers) you find with low-cost competitors.

Step 3: simplification (AI model + business rules)

The raw outline then gets simplified. We drop noisy details (fine wrinkles, fabric folds), thicken the structural lines, and close the regions so they can be filled in. That step combines an AI model with our own business rules.

Step 4: pre-print review (mandatory)

Every page is reviewed before printing. We check there's no deformed face, no extra or missing limb, no open contour that would make colouring impossible. If a page doesn't pass, it gets regenerated or reworked. That step is what separates our service from an automatic generator.

Step 5: layout and printing

No AI at this stage. Layout on a fixed template, high-resolution export, then on-demand printing by our print partner, close to your delivery address.

What AI doesn't do

• Pick the photos for you: you do that.
• Decide on format or page order: we do, based on rules.
• Print or bind: that's our print partner, close to you.
• Sign off the final quality: a human does.

And what about your photos?

Your photos are stored in Europe, processed only for your order, never used to train a model, and automatically deleted 7 days after delivery, once processing (generation, printing, delivery) is complete. The technical detail sits in our privacy policy.

AI speeds up production. The result, though, only holds together because of the human check that follows.