Textures

[Walter Soyka]

If the look is transforming a video into an illustration as your reference image showed, no, you cannot do it with just a blending mode. You need something that will do localized palette restrictions and edge outlining. It’s non-trivial to make this portable across applications, unless you use a third-party plugin like BCC that exists on all your hosts.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Simon Ubsdell]

Here’s what I’d do based on your example.

Find a suitable base layer texture – I’ve used a nice aluminium with enough organic variation but not too much. you may decide to use the colour of your original texture image, or you can colour correct it to taste.

Take the image you want to treat and blend it over the texture using Multiply – add a Blur to this layer and reduce the opacity a bit, down to around 75%.

Add another layer of the image, blend it using Overlay and again add blur and knock back the opacity.

Add another layer of the image, again blend it using Overlay and knock back the opacity but this time don’t add a Blur.

To this result (make a compound or nest or do whatever it required to group it all together in your host application), add colour filters to first of all reduce the saturation a lot, then to tint it and remove a lot of the blue, and then to reduce the contrast a lot, adjusting the overall brightness as necessary.

The key thing is how you add the texture, flattening the contrast, reducing the sharpness with the blurs and reducing the saturation. How much or how little of all this you do will depend on the look you are going for and the actual colour composition of the shot(s) you are trying to treat. You can try different blend modes besides Overlay (eg Soft Light or even Screen) and you could try Darken instead of Multiply – it’s a question of finding the look you want.

Edit: Try adding an Erode filter to your top Overlay layer – this can help reduce the sharpness of the edge detail and make it look more hand-drawn and less photographic.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki