Art Manipulation

[Myra]

I've seen people augment real photos to look more anime-ish, I was wondering if there were particular programs people would recommend to this end? Thank you.

[trooper6]

I believe they use photo manipulation programs like GIMP and Photoshop, or alternately a program like Sketcher...but I am no expert.

[firecat]

you don't need a just a program, you just need to know the different ways the photos work. these are examples of how people do it:

http://s-defenestration.deviantart.com/ ... -121614991

http://tamarar.deviantart.com/art/Photo ... -357134419

http://eilorendil.deviantart.com/art/AB ... 8-48764478

http://azurylipfe.deviantart.com/art/ho ... n-29348474

as you can see its more than just one click.

[spearcarrier]

There is a free Paintshop and Photoshop plug-in I use called Fine Touch by Redfield. If you use it, I recommend donating to the developers as a thank you.

Basically I make several layers of the picture, run fine touch, and then use edge finder and another plugin called Sketch to get lines out for the top. Sketch can run by itself, bu it's expensive. I play with layer settings a lot, because what works for one picture doesn't always work for another.

[Alte]

I recall of hearing a technique from fioricca that can make photos anime-like as possible starting with the colors.
[photo samples from me, filtered/ repainting done by fioricca] both examples are free to use, no need to give credit.

First I 'recolour' the photos using Colour Dodge fill layers (I used soft light previously, but find that Colour Dodge work much better for photos), and adjust contrast with brightness/contrast and hue/sat. My goal here is to get colours that are as anime-like as possible, so I tend to kill it with the saturation. Once I get the colours which I think are nice, I merge all the layers together and apply the Oil Paint filter, tweaking with adjustments. The point is to get something that's not too crisp (it'll look photo-like) but not too stylised either, so my settings are always on the lower end. I use zero shine too. Of course, you end up with something that's got a lot of gaussian blur, which generally does not match the sharpness of hand-drawn sprites; so I duplicate said oil paint layer and do a smart sharpen on it. My settings are pretty extreme, but it's so I can fiddle with the opacity afterwards. It's easier for me to control the sharpness values that way. (I actually stole this trick from OokamiKasumi.) After that is manual repainting like enhancing the colours of the sky, adding clouds, softening shades... and doing whatever's left to do. It's actually surprisingly fun and addictive so I understand if you later share that you ended up filtering hundreds of photos at a time... OTL

Some tips for the recolour process:
--- I typically use four fill layers for colour dodge, red, yellow, green and blue. This is because they're primarily the values that I'm interested in tweaking. You can choose any shade of light red/light yellow/light blue that you like as long as they fall in those categories. Sometimes, when I'm interested in a magenta value instead of red, I change the light red to magenta. It depends on what you need.
--- Alte's photos are really good because the sky is captured well. You'd only need to airbrush it with deep blue on overlay (best done on a new layer) to enhance the colours. I used this a lot for the water too; dark/deep colours set on overlay makes a certain colour richer.
--- Conversely, dark/deep colours set on screen is what I like to use to soften dark shadows and give it more colour than the standard grey.
--- for repainting (anything that uses the Brush tool), any set of painting-based brushes like these ones will do.

There's no one set method to do it because every photo is different; some would need more recolouring than others.

Edit: If you need a program that can manipulate photos with filters at ease, try FotoSketcher. How does it look like an anime/ cartoon depends on the setting. The results might be a hit or miss.

[runeraccoon]

I recall of hearing a technique from fioricca that can make photos anime-like as possible starting with the colors.
[photo samples from me, filtered/ repainting done by fioricca] both examples are free to use, no need to give credit.

First I 'recolour' the photos using Colour Dodge fill layers (I used soft light previously, but find that Colour Dodge work much better for photos), and adjust contrast with brightness/contrast and hue/sat. My goal here is to get colours that are as anime-like as possible, so I tend to kill it with the saturation. Once I get the colours which I think are nice, I merge all the layers together and apply the Oil Paint filter, tweaking with adjustments. The point is to get something that's not too crisp (it'll look photo-like) but not too stylised either, so my settings are always on the lower end. I use zero shine too. Of course, you end up with something that's got a lot of gaussian blur, which generally does not match the sharpness of hand-drawn sprites; so I duplicate said oil paint layer and do a smart sharpen on it. My settings are pretty extreme, but it's so I can fiddle with the opacity afterwards. It's easier for me to control the sharpness values that way. (I actually stole this trick from OokamiKasumi.) After that is manual repainting like enhancing the colours of the sky, adding clouds, softening shades... and doing whatever's left to do. It's actually surprisingly fun and addictive so I understand if you later share that you ended up filtering hundreds of photos at a time... OTL

Some tips for the recolour process:
--- I typically use four fill layers for colour dodge, red, yellow, green and blue. This is because they're primarily the values that I'm interested in tweaking. You can choose any shade of light red/light yellow/light blue that you like as long as they fall in those categories. Sometimes, when I'm interested in a magenta value instead of red, I change the light red to magenta. It depends on what you need.
--- Alte's photos are really good because the sky is captured well. You'd only need to airbrush it with deep blue on overlay (best done on a new layer) to enhance the colours. I used this a lot for the water too; dark/deep colours set on overlay makes a certain colour richer.
--- Conversely, dark/deep colours set on screen is what I like to use to soften dark shadows and give it more colour than the standard grey.
--- for repainting (anything that uses the Brush tool), any set of painting-based brushes like these ones will do.

There's no one set method to do it because every photo is different; some would need more recolouring than others.

Edit: If you need a program that can manipulate photos with filters at ease, try FotoSketcher. How does it look like an anime/ cartoon depends on the setting. The results might be a hit or miss.

These are awesome tips and really timesaving---provided I could manage to do similar thing in Medibang... Thank you so much! Now I know what to look for in photo manipulatior for VN BG for my taste!