Incorporating Custom Color Palette Mapping into a Paint Effect

Today’s post picks up where yesterday’s left off. Yesterday we discussed how to auto-extract a custom color palette from a source image we liked the color appearance of, and then use the custom color palette to re-colorize a different source image or movie file to try and replicate the original color feel of the image the custom color palette was auto-generated from. Today’s we’ll show how to take yesterday’s approach and build it into a more extensive PASeq that generate paint animation effects.

The steps we used to build a custom color palette are the same as in yesterday’s post. I started by selecting a color image of a painting I liked the color appearance of, and loaded it as the source image. I then ran the Edit : Color Palette : Generate from : Source Image menu command to auto-generate a custom color palette from my source image of interest.

None of these initial steps to setup the custom color palette were recorded in my Processing PASeq. As you may recall from yesterday, we have the ability to embed a specific color palette into an individual image processing action step.

I then loaded the source movie I was interested in re-colorizing as a part of an overall paint animation processing strategy (1st gallery image). The paint action sequence (PASeq) I used for for my complete paint animation strategy is shown below (2nd gallery image).

Note that the first 3 action steps are identical to the PASeq we built for doing colorization yesterday. Again, we set the Pal/Grad Playback parameter in the Color Palette Map ip op action step to Reset, so that the custom color palette would be played back when that action step ran when using the PASeq for processing a static image or a movie file.

For this particular effect, I wanted to build my paint animation using the colorized source movie as opposed to the original source movie coloring. I could have broken the processing up into 2 different processing passes. First, colorizing my original source movie file, and then using the colorized movie file as a new source for the paint animation processing. But I was interested in building both parts of the overall effect into a single PASeq, so that all of the processing could be generated in a single render pass.

The trick I used was to record the Canvas : Canvas to : Source menu command as the 4th action step in the PASeq after the initial colorization processing (4th gallery image above). This Canvas to Source action step takes the current canvas image and loads it into the source area.

If I was processing a single loaded source image this would replace the original source image with my processed canvas image. But when using the Action : Process with Paint Action Sequence : Source to Movie (or Movie to Movie) menu commands this will only temporarily replace the current source frame with the contents of the canvas during the overall frame by frame movie output processing.

I then added the paint animation pieces of my movie processing strategy to the end of the PASeq, after the initial colorize the source image and then reload the source with the colorized source action steps discussed above. I choose a simple erase to white action step and then paint in the source with a single AutoPaint action step paint strategy to keep things simple for this example.

As you may recall from previous discussions on movie processing, erasing to white for each frame is a bad way to build temporal continuity in a paint animation, and can lead to the introduction of visual flicker into the resulting animation. I could have used 2 layers to build this effect, to allow for re-colorizing the source frames in one hidden layer and then building an over-painting animation strategy in a second layer that is used for output of the final rendered paint animation effect.

Other Approaches to Palette Colorizing Paint Effects

There are other approaches to building paint effects from custom color palettes that don’t involve temporarily replacing the source image as a part of the PASeq like we do in this post. Setting the Source Image Coloring Option popup in the Source Area to Paletize when using the Image tab in the Source Area will force the paint synthesizer to only paint with colors that are contained in the existing source color palette. This setting is stored and played back with any paint action step recorded in a PASeq.

There’s also a parameter at the top of the Paint Color Source control panel in the paint synthesizer called Save Color Palette that will embed a custom color palette into a paint synthesizer preset if this parameter is turned On. There’s also a Save Color Gradient parameter that allows you to embed a custom color gradient.

So, we’ve discussed 3 different approaches to building in re-colorization into an overall paint strategy for processing a movie file. You can break you processing up into 2 separate passes, first colorize, then paint animate. Or you can build both of the processing components of the 2 pass strategy into a single PASeq by setting the Source to the Canvas in the middle of your PASeq action script. Or you can turn on palletize painting options in the Source Area to directly force your paint strokes to only use colors derived from your custom color palette, while also embedding the custom color palette into the recorded paint action steps in your PASeq (or in an exported paint preset for that matter).

Incorporating Custom Color Palette Mapping into a Paint Effect

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