ToonIt! Photo: Quickstart Guide
Welcome to the Introduction to Digital Anarchys ToonIt Photo plugin. Im Jim Tierney, President of Digital Anarchy, and Im going to talk about how Toonit does the cartooning that we all love. If you are looking to create gorgeous imagery from your photos or drawings inside Photoshop, then youve come to the right video. Lets start o by applying Toonit to our photograph. The human face is typically what is most dicult to toon because we have so many expectations about what the features and expressions should look like. Preserving those details is what makes Toonit so amazing, so were going to use a close-up of two women. ToonIt will do a fabulous treatment of their faces and of smaller details like their hair, hands and clothing. Ive already opened my image in Photoshop. There is only one layer in this le, but if there were more, I would want to make sure that the correct layer is selected in my Layers palette over here. Now Ill go to the Filters menu in Photoshop, go down to the Digital Anarchy submenu, and choose Toonit Photo. In just a moment, a new window opens up showing all of the Toonit controls. You can see that a cartoon eect is applied immediately to our image. 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 elds that create a at celshaded look. Black outlines are laid around the edges of the color elds. Lets take a look at how this cartoon is created. The Eects Palette over here (mouse over) is where you choose the basic cartoon eect. There are groups of parameters that create eects like color elds, Shadows, Outlines. (click on tabs) Each Eect group has a bunch of options to change its look around. Over on the right are the Style Controls. (mouse over) This is where you netune the Eect that you have chosen. Each Style gives you ways to change the appearance of the Eect. The Style also sets the type of rotoscoping algorithm used by ToonIt that is the basis for the cartoon. If I click on this popup, (click on popup) you will see that there are many Styles to choose from and they include traditional cartoon looks like Flat Shaded as well as more stylized choices like Airbrush and Poster Paint. The last part of the interface that I want to point out is the Preset Manager. (mouse over) This gives you pre-made groups of dierent Eect and Style settings. Presets let you get quickly started with ToonIts cartoon looks and as you can see (click on popup) weve shipped a whole bunch of them with the product. You can also save a group of Style and Eect settings so you can reuse that look again in the future.
2008, Digital Anarchy : f/x tools for revolutionaries | ToonIt! Photo : Give photos a cartoon look.
I have a nal thing to point out about ToonIt. When you click the Ok button down here, ToonIt renders out the cartoon settings and puts you back inside of Photoshop for the render. The next time you open up ToonIt, the plugin will remember the last settings that you rendered. If you changed this Flat Shaded style to Airbrush in the Style popup, then Airbrush and all of its settings will load up. If you change the Lightness value from 0 to 50, then 50 will load in. 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. Now lets make some changes to our cartoon. 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 Eects that are tucked into this tab here. (click on tab) The concept of Outlines is pretty easy to understand. If you click on the Use Comic option and uncheck it, you will see that the black lines disappear, leaving only at elds of color. Not having outlines gives the cartoon a totally dierent look & feel. There are two other checkboxes in the Outlines area. One is called Use Soft. 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. You can also checkmark the Outlines Only option. (click on Only) This ignores the color elds 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. We can make those outlines thicker by changing Comic Thickness. 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. Lets change Thickness to 3, and then uncheck Outlines Only. Doing this immediately brings back those terric color elds that weve had hidden for awhile. Now lets look at how we can change how our colors behave. We will do this over in the Eects Palette with the Flat Shaded settings. To better see what is happening with our colors, lets uncheck Use Comic and turn those outlines o.

Simplicity is what is causing all of these color regions to appear. It controls the amount of color detail that is in the cartoon. 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. If we make Simplicity a higher value, like setting it to 25, there are fewer regions of color and less detail. This makes the image look more simplied and like the at cartoon style that were used to seeing. If you have a photo with a lot of small elements or objects that need to be preserved, you can use a lower Simplicity value. For our semi-closeup of two faces, we want a higher Simplicity to make their features look less detailed and more cartoonish. We can also change the Flatness parameter to further simplify the cartoon. Flatness aects the smoothness of the transition between color elds. The higher Flatness is, the more the areas blend and, well, the atter the cartoon appears. If we set Flatness to 20, you can see that this makes highlights and shadows stand out while reducing the overall image depth. Check out how the highlight on this womans cheek is more dened and brighter but the other colors in her face seem more blended. If I lower Flatness to a value of 3, this makes the color elds blend together more. The image will look less at and give you something closer to the Waking Life rotoscoped type of look. I want something that looks more like a at 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. That is very important when cartooning the human face and something that Toonit excels at. Well, you now know the basics of using the Toonit Photo plugin in Photoshop. We now have a at, shaded, outlined cartoon that was simple to create and is really nice to look at. So go forth, cartoon and prosper. Ill click the OK button to render this cartoon back into Photoshop. As its rendering, Id like to thank you for listening to my tutorial about ToonIt Photo, a cartooning plugin for Photoshop made by Digital Anarchy. Please check our website at www.digitalanarchy.com to learn more about ToonIt Photo and download a free demo and support material.