Roto Toon plug-in, Color Effects group

The Color Effects group has a global effect on your Roto Toon footage. These controls are Outline Color and the Lighter controls. 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.

Outline Color is a really important control. It sets the color used for all of the Outline settings. On 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 is black (default), dark gray and maroon. Comic Outlines turned on.

Left to right: Outline Color is changed for the Woodcut Outlines, Marker Outlines with Crackle, and Stipple Pattern.

Lighter group (NEW to v2.0)

Lighter is a combination of effects intended to lighten flesh tones without making colors desaturated. Lightness still leaves in the dark colors of your footage. Using Lighter, a cartoon effect could look like the Sunday comics, especially after outlines are overlaid.

Lighter

Lightness raises the brightness of the image by a percentage value. This takes care of any unwanted color blending in the tooning process. The more analogous two colors are, the more likely they’ll get blended by the roto-tooning process. By raising the Lightness (or brightness), you re-separate those colors a bit.

This control is also a good way to fix your footage if it looks too dark. Kind of a low-level brightness filter without any midtone control.

Left to right: Lighter at 0 (default), 50 and 100. Higher values make the footage brighter.

Lighter Type

There are two Lighter Types, Lighter1 and Lighter2. Each provides a different algorithm for lightening the cartooned footage. NOTE: If the Lighter control is set low, then you will not see a difference between the two Lighter Types.

- Lighter2 is the default. It uses a nonlinear lightening algorithm that produces an attractive, lightly shaded, comic book look. Lighter2 works great when used in conjunction with the Duotone effect.
- Lighter1 is based, in part, on altering the gamma. This means the algorithm is playing around with the pixel color value and its luminance (or what you might loosely call 'intensity').

At left, Lighter2 Type (default). At right, Lighter1 Type. For both, Lighter at 80.

Blend With Original

This is a percentage slider that will fade the Roto Toon 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), 30 and 60. At a mid-range Blend value, the footage looks similar to the No Roto style.