Outline

[Frank N]

Hi, I am looking for some straight outlines. Something like the ones you can find here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/athoskat/15149343/ So far all I could discover myself is sort of too feathery or too fiddly. Happy for any tip. Thanks in advance.

[Synthetik]

Here's a folder of a few PASeqs i tossed together quickly to show off some different approaches. Depending on your specific source image you might want to tweak the settings a little. If you want to insert the black outline into a colored painting like the example use min compositing. The spot remover ip op is a good way to get rid of small noise dots or line segments. If you have any questions let me know.

outlines.zip

[Frank N]

Thanks John!

[Synthetik]

The presets i posted that use the paint synthesizer are using a 1 pixel hard edges line, so they can be a little pixelated. You could edit them to draw with a slightly larger anti-aliased brush.

For the ip ops, some of the ones used has a soft threshold option which you could use as opposed to a hard threshold.

You also have the ability in 3.5 to output eps from the paint synthesizer. So depending on what you are doing you could generate an eps file to render in photoshop at very high res if you wish.

Upcoming version 4 has some new features for this kind of thing that can draw with really fine anti-aliased lines. The version 4 paint synthesizer also has the option to draw with vector paint instead of raster paint. So if you are creating eps you can draw or render that into the studio artist 4 canvas directly.

[Frank N]

I am also working most of the times with film/video clips and I am not very familiar with the eps format. What is the advantage of dumping out files as an eps?

[Synthetik]

The advantage of eps in certain situations is that it's resolution independent. So you could create something and then use it for an imax film later without having to recreate the original frame images. And you can import numbered eps frames into flash.

The disadvantage is that you are stuck with eps for rendering paint strokes, so it's going to be flat color paint strokes or flat colored regions. So you lose all of the wonderful organic textures, smears, water or wet effects that studio artist can create with raster paint. Vector graphics in general have a very stylized artificial look that works well for certain situations and not at all for others.

So processing a movie file with a PASeq to numbered eps frames is not something you would necessarily do everyday, but it is an option available to you in studio artist. If you were doing a cartoon style animation it might be advantageous, if you want to use studio artist to create raw material for flash animations it might be useful, if you want to create moving rich organic textured effects for your video footage then it's probably not going to be of use to you.

[Frank N]

Once again, thanks a lot.

[Paul Perlow]

Frank,

Try creating a layer overlay from the art usingTexture Invert. You can lighten it using Adjust, Lum Adj or bias to get rid of an extraneous or grey detail. Alsoyou can adjust the layer transparency. You can also erase any line work you do not want. This helps me at times to create nice line work.

[Frank N]

Thanks Paul,

I will give it a try too!

[Synthetik]

There's also a Mod Type in Paint Fill Apply called 'Add Src Texture' you can use in a paint preset if you wanted to build a paint preset that let you work with the source texture mixed into a paint preset. You can also use the Source Texture as a Source for any Brush Load presets.

[Frank N]

Hi Paul, how to erase something? I do not find this function.