Aperture Blur and Color Cartoon Effects.

Digital Anarchy's Aperture cartoon effects plugin, ToonIt! Photo pairs an amazing rotoscoping engine and terrific edge detection to produce a full-fledged cartoon effect. The Aperture Blur and Color Effects are the primary part of every cartoon effect.

There are four parameter groups in the Blur/Color Effect section: Main Blur, Outline Blur, Color and Duotone.

Let's toon this mom and child! Image from ArtBeats.com.

Main Blur group.

The Main Blur is the touchstone for the rotoscoping effect. This is where the beautiful cartoon look starts. This group is always on; there is no checkbox for turning it off/on as with the other Blur/Color groups. You can turn on/off Outline Blur controls to decide how much Outlines are affected by the color settings.

Main Blur at its defaults. Outlines are turned off.

Main Blur with Radius at 25, Threshold at 2. Outlines are on, Outline Blur is off.

Blur + Outlines + Styles.

Because the Main Blur controls are your cartoon springboard, it's really fun to play around with their settings in conjunction with Outline Effects and Flat Styles. The Flat Shaded and Flat Detailed Styles give more traditional cel-shaded looks. The Outline Effects control how the black edge lines appear. When you play around with all of these parameters, you get a subtle but wide variation in the way your cartoon looks. It's quite fun.

Main Blur with Flat Detailed and Soft Outlines.

Main Blur with Flat Shaded and Comic Outlines.

Color & Duotone groups.

The Color group can lighten up the image without affecting the dark tones the way Tint Foreground does. You also have a Blend With Original option for merging the cartoon with its original image.

A traditional 'duotone' is the result of creating a grayscale image from two different colors. Our Duotone group lets you easily convert any image into a two color cartoon. The default is a grayscale image from black and white, but you can substitute with any colors.

Lightness at 80, Lighter 1 option chosen.

Duotone with Color 1 at white, Color 2 at purple.

--> Read about Outline Cartoon Effects and the more Dramatic Fun Effects.