Frequent Questions about ToonIt! Photo.

Don't see the answer you need? Contact us with this Request Form. You can also go to our Anarchy Underground Forum to post a question.

Does ToonIt work on animal images?

We would like to turn our wildlife photos into different cartoon images like outlines and pencil drawings. Will work ToonIt work for this?
Yes, ToonIt would work nicely for that kind of photograph. The plugin is terrific at transforming the human or animal face and form into a cartoon. For instance, if you look on our ToonIt Gallery page the artist Nick Cattermole has done some nice work with monkeys in India.

I have downloaded the trial version of your product. However, there seems to be lines going across my images when I use the product. Is this normal or will it go away if I buy the software?
The crosshatch lines that appear are the demo watermark. This allows you to evaluate the product before purchasing. When you purchase the product, you get a serial number will unlock the crosshatch watermark.

I have tried the Photoshop demo for Mac but do not plan to purchase now. How do I uninstall the ToonIt! demo?
Removing the plugin demo is very easy. On your drive, go to this location: Hard Drive/Applications/Adobe Photoshop/Plug-ins/Digital Anarchy/ToonIt. Put the ToonIt folder in your Trash.

Why doesn't my ToonIt! Photo preset look the way it did when I created it?
Since every image is different, the presets won't have the same effect. Sometimes they will come out as expected, sometimes you will need to tweak them a bit, and sometimes they just won't work for a given image. In general, the Photoshop presets are designed to work with an image that is a well lit face, with a dark or simple background, and not much detail in the clothing. The further away you get from that imagery -- like a subject in shadow with a bright background -- the less likely the preset will produce an expected result.

Can I run ToonIt! Photo in Adobe Lightroom? It is non destructive to the pictures and the changes can be shown right away without waiting for preview time.
Not at this time. Lightroom isn't doing its image processing in the way that ToonIt! Photo does. So it's easier for that application to speed things up. A closer example to ToonIt! Photo is Photoshop's Smart Blur. It's really difficult to make these types of things real time on large images. That said, we will be looking at using GPU's in the future and that may get us closer to providing near-realtime renders.

I did a render into Adobe Photoshop and there are a number of differences between the image I previewed and the image that came out. For instance, the render has added outlines to some areas and removed them from others.
The Preview Window is just a preview. If you want to see exactly what the image is going to look like once rendered in Adobe Photoshop, you need to have the preview at 100% (which will slow you down somewhat). If there's a difference between Preview at 100% and the final render, that's a problem. But ToonIt! Photo is based on the pixels in the image and applying the cartoon effect to a 1000x1000 image vs. a 500x500 (50% and a lot less pixels) image will yield slightly different results.

I have chosen the Color Flow function but it doesn't seem to be working. The colors don't shift as expected.
Color Flow only works with colors that have 100% in the Saturation component of HSB colorspace. This means that when you open up the Color Picker to pick a new color, the color has to have 100% as its ‘S’ value. (It can’t be 99, it must be 100.) This makes happy, bright, fully saturated colors.

Will ToonIt work with Paint Shop Pro version 8?
It's possible that ToonIt will work with Paint Shop. However, we do not test or provide support for that host application. You can download and try out the ToonIt demo from here. If the demo works, then the purchased version will work too. However, keep in mind that we only provide technical support for use in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

The preview was quick but Toonit! takes a long time to render when I click Ok. Why is it so slow? Can I make it render faster?
ToonIt! Photo is a quality vs. speed effect. It simply requires a lot of processing to create the desired cartoon effect. Other cartooning effects use glorified Posterization algorithms to create their results. This runs pretty fast but doesn't create as sophisticated a look. ToonIt! Photo provides pretty spectacular results and again, which is why its Preview and Render times are often quite high.

Some tips for speeding up the render:
Some factors that make ToonIt! Photo run faster are working in RGB instead of CMYK and working in 8-bit instead of 16-bit. We have found in our tests that ToonIt! Photo will run faster in Photoshop CS4 than Photoshop CS3, though this is dependant in part on your computer specs. Still, it's important to keep in mind that you need a little patience to work with ToonIt! Photo.

We are committed to improving the preview and render times as ToonIt! Photo matures, and already have some plans for optimizations in the very near future. However, we are even more firmly committed to making sure that the quality of the results are rivaled only by manual rotoscoping. The high quality results are what make it stand out and makes the product worth using.