COMIC-LIFE. AMAZING! Comic book video filters?

[Joe Chao]

I feel that Chinese painting is a little simillar to comic painting sometime.Here is my tutorial about it.BTW,it also including a comic effect in the project file.I adjust Chinese painting effect and turn it into a comic-like effect.The defect of this effect is that it’s hard to add texture only for some certain fields.

On the other hand, you might achieve it in Photoshop with the help of some plugins like “Sketch Master”.here is the link of their web site:
https://www.redfieldplugins.com/sm.htm

Wish to be helpful.

[Andrew Shanks]

Thats a fairly simple print look to achieve (I certainly wouldn’t waste money on that plugin for photoshop, …theres a couple of similar free plugin/presets on the Adobe Studio site which will give equal if not better looks).
As far as for video, the one app that leaps to mind (for macs at least) is Studio Artist:
https://www.synthetik.com/
Having said that, you don’t need to go that way, experimenting in After Effects might get you some interesting results, …indeed its a topic that pops up from time to time, …if you look up comic and/or cartoon looks for video on this forum you should find some recipes to experiment with. Just off the top of my head, throw a layer into a new comp, duplicate the layer, desaturate the top layer, use an find edge filter, apply levels to it and tweak to get nice outlines (hand animated paint strokes on this top layer would make the effect look a lot nicer, but is quite time consuming, you’d use the image underneath as a rotoscoping paint guide), then use multiply to effectively apply the outline top layer to the layer underneath (use opacity to tweak the look). Tweak the hue/saturation of the bottom layer, maybe even posterize it a bit to give it a limited palette (depending on the image, maybe knock saturation back by 50%), …there are some halftone print-pattern style plugins around (I think Digieffects has a print style plugin for after effects which would add that texture to the comp) maybe throw one of those on.
I’m sure others will have plenty of suggestions. Theres certainly no hard and fast methods in AE for getting the look, but with a bit of experimentation you can get some pretty funky looks.

Goodluck!

andrew

[Peter O’connell]

The effect in those images is achieved in Photoshop by copying the layer that the image is on, then to the top copy you add a gaussian blur of a few pixels and then change its blending mode to darken.

[Steve Edwards]

You can also go to Photoshop, filters, and Artistic, and select Posterize.

[Paul Whishaw]

Thanks for the tips. Some neat new ideas. I don’t think they are the same as the Comic Life filters but some great ideas that I can surely use. Thanks for the input.