Color By Number Pro vs Photoshop: Which Is Better for Coloring Books?

If you're creating color-by-number or mystery mosaic coloring books, you've probably wondered whether you need Photoshop or if a dedicated tool like Color By Number Pro is enough. Both can technically produce color-by-number pages, but the experience — and the results — are dramatically different. Let's break it down.

Time Comparison: Minutes vs Hours

This is the single biggest difference, and it's not even close.

Photoshop Workflow

To create a single color-by-number page in Photoshop, you need to:

1. Open the image and resize it to your book dimensions
2. Reduce colors using Posterize or Indexed Color mode
3. Manually create a grid overlay with guides or a custom script
4. Sample each cell's color and assign a number
5. Place number labels in every cell (hundreds or thousands of them)
6. Create the color palette legend separately
7. Export the numbered page, color page, and palette page

Even for an experienced Photoshop user, this process takes 2-4 hours per image. For a 50-page book, you're looking at 100-200 hours of tedious manual work.

Color By Number Pro Workflow

1. Upload your image (or up to 410 images at once)
2. Choose your settings: cell shape, color count, grid density
3. Click generate
4. Export your complete book PDF

Total time: 2-5 minutes per image. A complete 50-page book can be ready in under an hour, including all number pages, color pages, palette pages, and answer keys.

Feature Comparison

Photoshop is the world's most powerful image editor. But power doesn't always mean better for a specific task. Here's how the features stack up for coloring book creation:

Cell Shapes

• Photoshop: Square grids only (unless you write custom scripts or manually draw shapes). Creating hexagonal or circular grids requires advanced scripting knowledge
• Color By Number Pro: Five built-in cell shapes — Square, Circle, Hexagon, Diamond, and Triangle. Switch between them with one click

Automatic Numbering

• Photoshop: No automatic numbering. You place every single number label manually, or write/buy a custom action script that may or may not work reliably
• Color By Number Pro: Fully automatic. Every cell gets the correct number based on the color palette. Numbers are sized and positioned for readability

Book Assembly

• Photoshop: You export individual pages and assemble the book yourself using InDesign, Acrobat, or another tool. Managing page order, bleeds, and margins is your responsibility
• Color By Number Pro: Exports a complete, print-ready PDF book interior with all pages in the correct order, properly formatted for Amazon KDP

Batch Processing

• Photoshop: Possible with Actions, but unreliable for this use case. Each image may need different settings, and the numbering step can't be fully automated
• Color By Number Pro: Upload up to 410 images at once and process them all with the same settings in a single batch

Color Palette Control

• Photoshop: Good color control through Indexed Color mode, but mapping colors to numbers is manual
• Color By Number Pro: Automatic palette generation with 8-48 color options. The palette page is generated alongside each design

Cost Comparison

This is where the decision gets really clear for most people.

• Photoshop: $22.99/month (Photography plan) or $54.99/month (full Creative Cloud). That's $276-$660 per year, every year, forever. And you still need to learn complex workflows or buy additional scripts
• Color By Number Pro: Starts at $27 one-time payment during Founders Launch (was $97). No monthly fees. No subscriptions. You pay once and use it indefinitely

To put it another way: the cost of two months of Photoshop pays for Color By Number Pro permanently. After that, every month Photoshop costs you money while Color By Number Pro costs nothing.

Quality Comparison

Can Photoshop produce better results? In theory, with unlimited time and expertise, a skilled Photoshop user could create a beautiful color-by-number page. In practice, the quality is comparable — and Color By Number Pro has some advantages:

• Consistent output — every page in your book has the same style, grid density, and number formatting. In Photoshop, maintaining consistency across 50+ pages is extremely difficult
• Optimized number placement — Color By Number Pro's algorithm places numbers for maximum readability, avoiding overlaps and ensuring every cell is clearly labeled
• Print-ready output — pages are generated at the correct DPI, dimensions, and margin settings for KDP. No guesswork
• Multiple cell shapes — hexagon, circle, diamond, and triangle grids are simply not practical to produce manually in Photoshop at any quality level

When to Use Each Tool

Use Color By Number Pro When:

• You're creating coloring books for Amazon KDP or any print-on-demand platform
• You want to publish books quickly and at volume
• You need multiple cell shapes (hexagon, circle, diamond, triangle)
• You want a complete book interior exported as a single PDF
• You're not a Photoshop expert and don't want to become one
• You want to keep costs low with a one-time purchase

Use Photoshop When:

• You need to heavily edit or manipulate source images before conversion
• You're creating a single custom piece of art (not a book)
• You already have a Creative Cloud subscription and use Photoshop for other work
• You want complete manual control over every pixel of the output

The Verdict

For creating color-by-number and mystery mosaic coloring books, Color By Number Pro wins decisively. It's faster (minutes vs hours), cheaper ($27 one-time vs $23/month), easier to use (no learning curve), and produces better results for this specific task (multiple cell shapes, automatic numbering, complete book export).

Photoshop is an incredible tool for general image editing. But using it to create color-by-number books is like using a Swiss Army knife to cut a steak — technically possible, but there's a much better tool for the job.

If you do heavy image editing as part of your workflow, you might use Photoshop to prepare your source images and then Color By Number Pro to convert them into book pages. The two tools complement each other well in that scenario.

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