User manual DIGITAL ANARCHY TOONIT PHOTO QUICKSTART GUIDE

[. . . ] ToonIt has three main parts to its interface and they all work together to create this cartoon. The default look of Toonit is a limited number of color fields that create a flat celshaded look. The Effects Palette over here (mouse over) is where you choose the basic cartoon effect. There are groups of parameters that create effects like color fields, Shadows, Outlines. [. . . ] This is great if you are treating similar photographs or want to run a batch process in Photoshop. If you want to start fresh, however, just click the Reset button down here to go back to ToonIts original settings. I like what Toonit created by default, but with a little tweaking, I can make it even better. Were mostly going to play around with the Flat Shaded color settings in the Style Controls and the Outline Effects that are tucked into this tab here. If you click on the Use Comic option and uncheck it, you will see that the black lines disappear, leaving only flat fields of color. Not having outlines gives the cartoon a totally different look & feel. If I turn on Use Soft, (click on Soft) you will get outlines that have some gray values mixed in. This produces a slightly softer look to the lines, as if there was a bit of charcoal shading added, and thus the name soft. If we go back to Use Comic, (click on Soft, then Comic) you can see that by comparison, Comic Outlines produces comic-book style hard edges with very little shading. You can think of Comic as looking like rough pencil or the inked edges of a graphic novel. (click on Only) This ignores the color fields and reduces the image to edge detection only. As you can see, the default colors are black for outlines and white for the solid background area, which makes our cartoon look more like a traditional line drawing or stylized pen and ink. This sets the thickness of the major lines, mostly the ones that Toonit feels set the depth and structure of the cartoon. If I change Thickness to 6, you can see that the lines around the womans neck and hair get much thicker but the lines around her eyes and nose stay delicate. Doing this immediately brings back those terrific color fields that weve had hidden for awhile. We will do this over in the Effects Palette with the Flat Shaded settings. To better see what is happening with our colors, lets uncheck Use Comic and turn those outlines off. 2 © 2008, Digital Anarchy : f/x tools for revolutionaries | ToonIt!Photo: Quickstart Guide Simplicity is what is causing all of these color regions to appear. A low Simplicity increases the number of color regions, which creates a smoother, more even look. If we change Simplicity to 5, you can see that we are preserving a lot of the detail of the original image, which looks nice, but it makes the image look less cartoonish. [. . . ] I want something that looks more like a flat cartoon so Im going to set Flatness back to 20. Weve limited this parameter to 20 because cranking it any higher would give you some really high render times. Now lets click the Use Comic option to turn our black outlines back on. These lines give us some nice, sharp edges in the womens faces while still preserving the subtleties of their expressions. [. . . ]