iPhoneography Apps: Lines and Color: ToonPAINT and BlurFX

Remember the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups ad campaign which included the line “Two great tastes that taste great together”? Well, in the world of iPhotography apps, there are some apps that work fine on their own, but work better in conjunction with other apps. Today I’m going to cover two of them.

Note: I find that these tutorials are getting too long to present them entirely on the blog home page. When pulling up all the photography posts, you have to scroll too far to get to the previous week’s tutorial, and getting to the ones from before the New Year is next to impossible. I will be adding “below the fold” marks so that you’ll have to click through from the home page to see the entire post. I think that’s the best choice in the long run.

ToonPAINT

ToonPAINT by Toon-FX/Insatiable Genius is an app that uses a sketching algorithm to give you a “cartoon” effect on your photos. It starts by allowing you to adjust the grayscale sketch, then allows you to paint in color, either from the original photo or from your imagination.

There are two separate apps, one for iPhone and one for iPad. I find that running the iPhone app on my iPad is sufficient for my needs, even if I miss out on a couple of additional controls. The home screen lists the sources for your photo (camera, photo gallery, or a previous session), allows you to see pictures in their “hall of fame”, and accesses preferences and in-app purchases.

ToonPAINT keeps track of your most recent sessions, so you don’t have to start from scratch to tweak a setting made previously.

The Preferences are minimal: allowing you to use two-fingered pinch for zooming rather than the built-in controls, and a reset for the color palette used when painting.

The two in-app purchases deal with the painting part of the workflow: ToonColor, which paints in the entire photo with the original colors at a single click, and Photo Brush, which selectively paints in the colors from the original as you brush.

Let’s start on a picture of a tree in my front yard. Loading the photo uses default values to produce a sketch: default values which can be adjusted. Across the bottom are controls to adjust the sketch. Tapping undo with bring up the Undo and Redo controls, so “undoing” is a two-step process.

The zoom control is a slider; panning is accomplished with a single-finger swipe when the zoom/pan tools is selected.

I prefer to adjust the “size” first. There are three controls with scales from extra-small to extra-large: Coherence, Edge Width and Edge Length. Coherence is how well the line follows the edge in the photo. XS will follow the edges closely.

XL makes the line more flowing, not following the edges at all.

Edge Width is just that: thin lines in XS, as seen above, and really thick lines at XL.

Edge Length control whether the lines are following the short edges, as above, or only longer edges will be outlined.

The Shading tool also has three controls, only using sliders instead of buttons. Edges controls the number of edges that are considered when deciding shading. Gray controls the amount of 50% gray used in shading, and Black controls the amount of black. Remember: you can’t color black, so try to keep the use of it low – just the lines. Big blocks of black are not generally what you want to see in your finished project. Extra Smoothing smooths out any jagged edges you may have.

Here’s the “sketch” that we will paint.

As we move on to the Paint portion of the workflow, we’ll start with the palette control. At the top are three buttons, then the eight default colors, the color picker, and the eraser. The first button will use the default colors, or whatever color you’ve picked, as the painting color. The second is ToonColor, the one-click painting using the original photo’s colors, and the third is Photo Bruch, which paints in the original color as you brush.

The Brush control is a slider used to change the size of your brush. The smallest setting is hard to control on a large picture, so you can do fine painting by zooming in all the way and using a small brush.

Here’s an example where I painted in the grass using the Photo Brush.

And here’s an example where I used the ToonColor.

You have several different options to save your photo, but be sure to flip the switch for high-res output. You can save the picture with or without the paint – and this is where our other program comes in.

BlurFX

ToonPAINT’s colors are flat and stay within the edges – and that’s fine, because a cartoon has flat colors. But sometimes, when I’m working on something, I want a little more – a little more texture, a little bleeding around the edges. BlurFX by DD Studio can give me that.

It can do some nice stuff all on its own, of course. When you load a photo into BlurFX, you are given the choice of three different kinds of blur, along with a slider to control the amount of blur. The first type is Gaussian blur: what we all think of as blurry.

Then there is a motion blur: the kind you get when you are quickly panning the camera. The drawback of BlurFX’s motion blur is that you can’t adjust the direction of the motion – horizontal is the only option.

The third type of blur, median, is the type I find most useful for painting purposes. Median takes each pixel and replaces its color value with an average of the color values of the pixels surrounding it. In small doses, it’s useful for noise reduction; in larger amounts, it produces well-delineated blocks of color.

When using BlurFX on its own, you can mask out portions of the blur to reveal the original color. Just tap the Show Mask button, choose your Brush Size and paint over the objects you wish to reveal.

I’ve seen many works online that use this selective focus to make some stunning artwork. Of course, this isn’t.

Once you get the blur adjusted, you can adjust the saturation or add a vignette.

You can also add a color filter. Caution: this filter is applied to the entire blurred photo; it is not affected by the mask.

When you’re ready, save your image.

Blending the lines and colors

Now you’ve got two images: black lines on a white background with some gray shading, and blocks of color.

How should you blend them together? (By that I mean what blend mode should you use, not which app – I use Image Blender, but there are many apps that can blend photos, like iColorama, Filterstorm, Laminar and Photoshop Touch.) You might think that you should make the sketch the underlying layer and apply the color image in Color mode. Unfortunately, color cannot be applied to white, so that’s not very useful.

Instead, I put the sketch over the color. Then, there will be several blend modes that will give you good results. I start out with Multiply, which will darken the underlying color with the blacks and grays of the sketch while the white of the sketch does nothing.

This attempt uses Hard Light mode, which uses (IMO) too much of the white from the sketch. It’s reminiscent of what would happen if you used Color mode with the sketch as the underlying layer.

Here’s Normal mode with the sketch faded back to about 45%. You’ll notice the lines are not solid black, but are faded.

My final decision was to use Multiply:

I then ran it through PhotoCopier to get some grunge.

Conclusion and Examples

Both ToonPAINT and BlurFX are fine little apps in their own right, but I find them most useful as steps along the way to a blend or collage. I’ll end with three examples. The first two use ToonPAINT, Blur FX and PhotoCopier.

The final one uses a watercolor done through Aquarella HD instead of BlurFX as the background. The frame was painted in through iColorama, and then it was finished in PhotoCopier.