Dvshade Easylooks Serial
EasyLooks 2.5 is compatible for Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express 4+, Motion 3.0, and Adobe After Effects CS3/4. For those who are still using a Power PC G4 or G5, DVShade EasyLooks might be your ticket for a color correction tool that goes far beyond the basics as it is compatible with those machines as well as the current Intel Processor Mac Pros. Toolfarm is the leading reseller of After Effects Plug-ins. We're your one-stop shop for the best professional visual effects, motion graphics, and plugins.
Bournemouth/London United Kingdom CreativeCOW.net. All rights reserved. Introduction Everybody likes someone who makes them look good and DVShade has been doing that for years.
The innovative and award winning gives every project the chance of looking beautifully graded with minimal effort making even dull and uninteresting subjects intriguing. Now for a bit of fun. DVShades latest offering does the same in a whole different way. LiveToon takes a dive into the comic book with the capability to turn your live action footage into convincing cartoons by adding a comprehensive toolbox of parameters to the traditional posterization effect, with stunning results. LiveToon, with the same ease that 'Looks' provided instant cinematic colour grading, transforms footage into our favorite drawn art form, with surprisingly effective results.
Below: Split shot showing LiveToon in action. Left is the clean image and Right is LiveToon's 'Deep Blacks' All source footage used with the kind permission of Ginger Productions. ©Ginger Production 2010 Out-of-the-box Presets By dropping the LiveToon filter on to your clip in Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, Motion or After Effects you are presented with great looking presets to inspire you and use out-of-the-box.
But there is also a comprehensive list of customizable parameters to tune and tinker with the image to better suit your material or create bespoke styles. You can be 'tooning' you films in no time. (Sorry couldn't resist the cheap pun) Below: One of the effective presets 'Comic Book' is a great one to get you started, note the print dot like texture Below: Another preset and a favorite of mine 'Graphic Novel', for a more gritty look.
The pleasing number of presets to get you started, cover the bases pretty well. 'Comic Book' gives a convincing well saturated impression of a quality illustrated story magazine, showing printing dots, soft broken edges, deep blacks and rich tones. 'Graphic Novel' presents the footage in the low rent colour pallet you would expect to see in hefty pulp fiction drawn classics, using cheap ink and paper, flat colour fills, heavy handed black block shading and a reduced hue range. The parameters you can manipulate to get what you want from the filter include the essentials for adding and removing colour and detail, 'Saturation' and 'Color Detail' handle these. 'Posterization' is the engine that makes the footage look 'cartoon', while 'Edge Lines' and 'Black Restore' fine-tune the look.
Dvshade Easylooks Serial
But it's the inclusion of the 'Screen' parameter that gives you the choice of halftone 'Dot', 'Line', 'Hatched' or 'Circular' to add the characteristic printed look. Below: LiveToon's parameters in Final Cut Pro. Hi Luke, others may have a differing opinion (and they are entitled to whatever opinion they hold on the subject) but as for me, I find that when cartoons are too close to real, they lose their effectiveness. That is why I like to see people start by shifting the frame count in a cartoon. Doing this harkens back to the days when cartoons were hand-drawn and they would shoot a photograph of the hand-drawn frame and make two of each frame. That way, cartoons were 24 frame movies but were really 12 frames with duplicate frames and that became the normal 'brain processing' that generations equated with cartoons. When 'A Scanner Darkly' came along (opening the door to things like the Charles Schwab commercials, et al), they used the full frames available - 24 frames for the movie and 30 for the commercials - and so the motion screams to the brain that this isn't a cartoon, it's a video or film that has been repainted to look like some kind of not-quite-cartoon.
When I see techniques like you have done here, Luke, and the artist takes the time to first get the frame motion correct, I have seen some good work. When it is done like the Charles Schwab commercials, my skin crawls as it is too creepy for me. We were just at Dreamworks Animation this week to see a preview screening of 'How To Train Your Dragon' and they were talking about this very phenomenon - where animation tries to get too close to reality - and they said that when that happens at DreamWorks, they throw out the whole scene and start over. They don't try to fix it. I thought it was great advice. One of the things that I absolutely hate about cartoonified video is when users do not take the extra step to 're-time' the frame rate so that it mimics the motion that you expect from a cartoon.
The Charles Schwab commercials are so '30 frames a second' that they give me the creeps. I found in my own cartoonifying efforts that using a tool like After Effects to posterize time down to 8 to 12 frames a second gives a believable timing that doesn't look like someone just slapped a cartoon filter onto full frame rate video. Retime the video before before you cartoonify it.
All of these 30 frame a second full motion cartoons give me the creeps.:o) A very good article and nice points you make in it, Luke. I hope you don't mind my suggestion. The recent addition of Motion Graphics templates to Adobe Stock in the Creative Cloud offers immediate access to over 1000 templates for title screens, lower thirds, and transitions, with more to follow, created by some of the world’s leading motion graphics artists and mograph pioneers Digital Juice.
Motion Graphics templates inside Adobe Stock also offer a new avenue for Creative Cloud artists to monetize their work, by offering their own motion graphics templates for sale. This is a multi-faceted story that dives deep into multiple parts of a rapidly expanding Creative Cloud ecosystem that doesn’t handily lend itself to brief soundbites. It does, however, lend itself to song. Everybody sing along!
Meet The Custom Tool, the most powerful and versatile tool in Blackmagic Fusion's entire toolbox??' Which ironically appears to do nothing when you first apply it. That’s because it’s a tool designed for building your own tools from scratch. That may sound daunting, but under the guiding hand of longtime VFX artist, editor, and business owner Simon Ubsdell, it’s engaging, empowering, and just plain fun. If you are new to Fusion and to compositing you'll find plenty of useful information here, including how to work with channels to create complex effects surprisingly simply.
Bonus tips on expressions and keying, too!