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(After Toonit! Photo has been applied)

(Original image before Toonit! Photo has been applied)

This is just the first in many more 64bit and CS5 updates to come. Here’s are run down of when you can expect these updates for our other products:

Primatte Chromakey: Available July 6th

Backdrop Designer: Available July 2010

Texture Anarchy: Available July 2010

3D Invigorator: Available August 2010

Have a fun and safe 4th of July everyone!

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In the first article, The 10 Most Common Mistakes Web Designers Make, the Author talks about, “with a little diligence, poor design can be easily avoided.” My favorite one, which is #1, talks about busy, crowded pages. There’s nothing worse then going to a website and not being able to find what you are looking for.

The second article, 20 Virtual Techniques & Best Practices For Effective Web Design, refers to “twenty excellent techniques and design elements you can incorporate into your designs to create a beautiful, polished website.” I found #20 interesting as it talks about adding a cartoon element. The Author says, “cartoon characters and other design elements keep your site looking fresher and younger.” So if you want to add a cartoon element to your web page, why not use our Photoshop plugin, Toonit! Photo? Toonit! Photo is an easy way to give your photos that sought-after cartoon look. Want to try the free demo? Click here.

To end this post off, here is a  funny footnote for a bad design article: The Ultimate Ugly Showcase of Current Government Websites. Go ahead knock yourselves out!

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©Ben Heine

Here at Digital Anarchy we have always been a big supporter of how illustrations can play a role within photography. Our plugin ToonIt! Photo lets you create cartoon effects, like shading and lines, from your own photographic images. Learn more about ToonIt! Photo here.

I had a few extra moments to play with the Pencil vs Camera concept using my own images and ToonIt! Photo. I shot these photos in Santa Cruz, CA on a very overcast day about two years ago. I would have liked to have a more pleasing sky but you can’t always get what you want, right? Here are the results:

Hope everyone has a great Memorial Day weekend! -Maggie

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Carl explained his piece, “The inspiration was the color and shape of the object/car combined with a bit of art. Toonit! is useful here to create interest in mediocre pictures. The image was an experiment using a new compact camera shooting on a rainy Fall day in downtown Portland.”

I love the soft, shaded floor that Carl generated, and how beautifully the painted floral pattern combines with the outlines of the cartoon effect. It is quite the ‘car-toon’. The original painting is by Michael Schultheis and was photographed with permission at Froelick Gallery in Portland, OR.

Here is Carl’s original photo, pre-cartooning:

The new background he added and toon’ed:

Want to make your ordinary images look extraordinary? Try ToonIt for Photoshop or ToonIt for Aperture on your own photographs. You can download a free trial of this cartooning software.

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Not by ToonIt!:

The image shown above was converted to a crappy cartoon by the Photo DJ function in my friend’s camera. It’s just a glorified postorization. I immediately IM’ed my friend and asked her to email me the original photo. She did. I ran the photo through ToonIt’s default settings and 35 seconds later, Pamela and Graah were properly tooned.

Cartooned by ToonIt:

A fun aspect to ToonIt is that it often makes photos look better than real life, or as I commented on Pamela’s new profile photo, “It makes good looking people look even better”. ToonIt smooths out facial lines, glosses over shiny skin and even slims down the face. It’s a fast, cheap way to glamorize yourself and your favorite peeps.

The original photo (aren’t they cute?):

Have a great weekend! -Debbie

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It’s fun becoming friendly with someone online, then discovering details like where she lives. Chrissie’s business name is ‘Kakadu Design’ and it didn’t occur to me what that indicated until I visited her website and looked at the promo images. Kakadu National Park is located in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Chrissie wrote to me, “I live up here where they call ‘the top end’ of Australia. Lots of Crocodiles and gorgeous Native Birds! Winter here at present, the dry season, so it has cooled just enough to not have the air conditioning running 24/7. Very tropical type weather so still in shorts & singlets in winter! It really is a beautiful part of the world and I am working from a very small remote area town in the heart of Kakadu World Listed Heritage National Park. Only about population of 500 or so in town, one small outback store and mainly tourist type businesses. In addition to my photography and digital work, I also paint on commission from photographs so if you are ever interested, just drop me an email.”

Sounds beautiful to me as I write from the “warm & sunny” summer weather of San Francisco, CA. High 50′s and quite foggy. Also beautiful are the water-media paintings on Chrissie’s site. Check out more art on her portfolio website, and a feature of her digital work in Digital Anarchy’s online ToonIt! gallery.

kind regards -Debbie

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Mark said, “Thanks for the cool tool. After only a few minutes of playing around with it, I decided to buy it (original and toonit versions of one picture attached). Love it!”

Mark’s ToonIt image:

When I asked him if the photo was of his band, Mark wrote back, “The folks in the photo are me, me, me and me – I was playing around with multiple exposures with my digital camera and Photoshop (when I SHOULD have been practicing the banjo – grin). Definitely not in a band – still a rank amateur. I just thought that photo would cartoon well.”

Mark’s original composite:

You can find more about Mark at www.professional-geek.com.  Looks like he’s quite busy outside of his music and art.  I love meeting intelligent tech professionals who also have a creative side and a sense of humor. It’s the best part of my job at Digital Anarchy!

regards -Debbie

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I love that Nick uses our ToonIt! Photo plugin to transform his photographs into delicate illustrations. Many people use ToonIt! for more ‘aggressive’ images, which is what cartoons typically look like, all thick black lines and bold heavy color fields. Nick’s illustrations are instead turned into soft, thin lines over a jeweled, geometric pattern of color.

Monk walking in the village, post-ToonIt! treatment:

Original photograph by Nick:

A great aspect of our Adobe Photoshop cartooning plugin is its ability to easily create a variety of visual styles. You can see some variations on this Color Styles page and this Cel-Shaded Styles page.

Nick’s illustrative treatment is very apparent in the closeups of his subjects. In the images below, the monkey’s expression is bought out by the color and contrast changes made in ToonIt! and Photoshop. The muted tones of brown and custard make a sensitive color palette.

Cartoon version #1. The new light eyes are very appealing.

Original photograph by Nick:

Cartoon version #2. Mixes in the dark/light contrast of the original photo.

Hmmm, no photographs of monkeys INSIDE the temples just yet… You can see more of Nick Cattermole’s photography and his Toonit! Photo work in our online gallery on www.digitalanarchy.com.

regards -Debbie

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When I returned to my Inbox this morning, my favorite roving panographer (if, in fact, there is such a term) had emailed to me his own stunning, low pixel image from a recent nature walk. Here is what Stanton Perry said about his photo, which was also taken with an iPhone, and its subsequent cartoon that uses our ToonIt! Photo plugin.

“What I love most about Toonit! is its uncanny ability to turn a “less than satisfactory” photograph into a work of art! A few weeks ago on Father’s Day, we were treated to a visit (on the 7th hole of my favorite course) from the native deer family. All I had with my was my iPhone, and even though the “natives” are friendly and not easily spooked, it was still challenging getting a shot. To be honest I wasn’t very impressed with my initial results, but after an hour with Toonit, I had a shot that I was proud to add to my portfolio!”

Thanks Perry! Here’s my ‘iToon’ nature shot.

All the best -Debbie

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ToonIt! is fun and easy to use and gives you amazing results when transmogrifying your photographs into cartoons. (Technical term per Calvin and Hobbs, a favorite real cartoon.) This is especially true when ‘tooning’ the human face and form, which most cartoon tools fail at. Ours doesn’t.

Most people send us exactly that, children and women turned into cartoons. A refreshing change comes from Stanton Perry of Rendertek.com. When I first saw Stanton’s work, which are all gorgeous panoramas and thus the nickname in this entry’s title, I was blown away by how well ToonIt! works with architectural and landscape settings.

Panorama #1, traditional toon.

After posting his entry in the ToonIt! Gallery, Stanton ‘Panorama’ Perry sent me an email saying, “Here’s another pano you might enjoy from the Hotel Regina in Cabo San Lucas. I’ve included 2 variations + master.” He is correct; I did enjoy, and now you can too.

The original photograph.

Panorama #2, kooky kartoon.

You can see Stanton Perry’s other artwork on his personal site, Rendertek.com.

regards -Debbie

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Recently I designed a logo for our new CarToonIt! Bundle, which gives a discount on the purchase of ToonIt! Photo. This product bundle is our Adobe Photoshop cartooning software that now also works in Apple’s Aperture.

The CarToonIt! logo was pretty easy to make because I based it off our existing ToonIt! logo. But that short design process made me think about my design revisions for the ToonIt! logo, which happened over a few weeks’ time, and I thought it would be fun to post some of the iterations here. Enjoy!

My original concept sketch:

First comp put together in Illustrator:

Next comp done in Photoshop:

A revised Photoshop version:

And the final ToonIt! logo:

regards -Debbie

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Here’s the result with the ToonIt! defaults rendered out of Photoshop:

Here is the original photo:

The only post-plugin editing that I felt was necessary was airbrushing out the nose ring from the girl’s face. Sometimes you will have to make little edits just because a detail that looks fine in the original photo simply doesn’t translate into black outlines and color fields. If you have a nice source image to start with, then this will happen infrequently. Try it yourself with our free ToonIt Photo demo!

regards -Debbie

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This web comic is self-described as ‘a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language’. It is also hysterically time-sucking so be careful if you click my link. XKCD also a great way to learn new geek words. So basically, this blog post of mine has absolutely nothing to do with Photoshop plugins, but it may help you to gain street cred with your IT or engineering department (or your 13 year old nephew who knows more than you).

For instance, look at the panel that was drawn for Valentine’s Day, titled ‘Sierpinski Valentine’:

What is ‘Sierpinski’, I ask myself. Go to wikipedia and I find that this is a reference to the ‘Sierpinski triangle‘ which is ‘a fractal named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński who described it in 1915. Originally constructed as a curve, this is one of the basic examples of self-similar sets, i.e. it is a mathematically generated pattern that can be reproducible at any magnification or reduction.”

Taking in this info, this simple, elegant panel is saying that love is a repeating self-generating pattern that can be very large or very small at any time. Aren’t comics great?

In truth, I get sorta lost after the first few lines of the Wiki description but hey, I’ve also just learned a new buzz word for drinking banter at the Siggraph trade show. Check here for info about xkcd, like exactly what that word means and why you shouldn’t write ‘Xkcd’.

regards -Debbie

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But suppose you want to make a cartoon the old fashioned way? By hand! Or rather, by hand in the computer. Well, there are a few websites that I’ve been hanging around for inspiration. They are Drawn!, Deviant Art and MyToons.

The Drawn! Blog, www.drawn.ca From their About page: “Drawn! is a multi-author blog devoted to illustration, art, cartooning and drawing. Its purpose is to inspire creativity by sharing links and resources. Albert Einstein said, ‘The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources,’ but what the hell did he know anyway? The links and posts on Drawn! are written by a small group of professional illustrators, designers, and cartoonists.”

Deviant Art forum/community, www.deviantart.com From their Facebook profile: “DeviantART aims to provide a place for any artist to exhibit and discuss his or her works… DeviantART features many forms of creative expression, organized in a comprehensive category structure. The artwork on display includes photography, digital art, traditional art, literature, Flash, filmmaking and skins for applications. The site also has extensive downloadable resources for use by creators such as tutorials and stock photography.”

MyToons community, www.mytoons.com From their front page: “MyToons.com is the world’s greatest online animation community. It’s also one of the most cutting-edge animation websites available. MyToons is the place where people who really love animation – from seasoned industry pros to rabid animation fans – can upload and share their creations and animated favorites in HD quality with the entire world – for free! With all the cartoons and fun stuff to see and do – it’s hard not to have fun at MyToons!”

all the best -Debbie

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Unfortunately, the ToonIt! manual took a week longer than the product release. It’s always the little stuff, like forgetting to plug in in the toaster, that trips me up. You can get the ToonIt! Photo manual from here. I apologize for the wait. Writing manuals is _almost as difficult as reading them.

The cartoon results for Molotov Cupcake.

Original image of an unamused cat.

For some holiday cheer, here are some photos that we had fun with during the manual writing process. The office cat didn’t appreciate the photo shoot, but we sure did. ;)

More toon added to the Cupcake kitten.

Less toon added.

As you can see, the amount of detail in your ToonIt! cartoon makes a difference for the final look & feel. Luckily, ToonIt! comes with effect and style choices that are easy and fast to use. This royalty-free photo is one of the samples you can download from our Demos page, so try out your cartooning ideas and have fun!

All the best -Debbie

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As I was working on the material for our launch, to keep myself amused late into the night, friends emailed me close-up photos of themselves. I would run a quick toon on the photo and sent the new image back. That was fun to do and a new word was born: ‘cartoodling’. It’s when you (ok, me) play around with a cartoon filter and just whittle and doodle the time away…

Below, my two late night helpers.

And remote support ;)

regards -Debbie

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The product is ToonIt! Photo and you can see images, well, right here. You can also check out footage showing off last year’s release of ToonIt for video apps. The medium is different but the underlying software is the same.

Even though I am working through the weekend, I’m having a blast writing our manual and web pages and tutorial scripts. After all, how can it NOT be fun to turn yourself (and mom) into a cartoon?

regards -Debbie

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