Outlines Only plug-in, Color Effect controls

This page covers a handful of important controls that don't fit into other groups. Two primary controls are Outline Color and Background Color. This page also discusses the Blend With Original control, which also globally affects the cartoon look.

Outline Color

Outline Color sets the final color of all the edge detection results. Put another way, this control sets the color of the outlines for your cartoon. The default color is black. The examples shown below all have an Outline Color that is dark. You can set the Outline Color to lighter colors, of course, but typically the results are less useful.

Left to right: Original footage from Artbeats Stock, www.artbeats.com. Outline Color is black (default) and red. Comic Outlines turned on.

Outline Color is a really important control. It sets the color used for all of the Outline control groups. At first glance, it's pretty obvious that the Comic Outlines and Soft Outlines groups make use of Outline Color. But many of the other color and outline groups rely on Outline Color as well, as you can see in our examples below. The Stipple group's tiny dots, Scratchboard's granular lines, and so on, are all colored by Outline Color.

Left to right: Outline Color changed for Scratchboard, Stipple and Conte Outlines.

Background Color (NEW to v2.0)

This sets the solid color against which the cartoon edges are composited. The default color is white. Changing this control can drastically shift the look of your cartoon.

Left to right: Background Color is tan, black and brown. Comic Outlines turned on.

Blend With Original

This is a percentage slider that will fade the Outline Only results back into the original image. By default, this is set to 0 and turned off. Higher values make more of the underlying image show through.

Left to right: Blend With Original at 0 (default), 40 and 70.