Subtitles of the Movie

Let's continue to refine the Cartoon effect by working with the Shading and also the Edge. What you have to do is pay attention up here in this corner as well as in the rest of the image. If you want to have less colors to deal with for a more comic book style you can knock it down by going to Shading Steps and look at the difference here: very harsh transitions from one color to the next. Likewise, if you want very refined Shading Steps you can go all the way to 30. I typically like it to have it really low, like so, when I'm doing a cartoon effect. Now, the Shading Smoothing also will add or remove detail, as I mentioned up here pay attention, up in the corner, when I drop this all the way down we get a lot of this smoothing knocked out as far as color, and we get a little bit more graininess. I'll go all the way up here and we bring the color back in and we get rid of some of that graininess. I'm going to reset and close these guys. Let's talk about the Edge for a minute. The Edge Threshold, the Width, the Softness and the Opacity, can all be accessed with these Sliders or the hot text, so with the Threshold I can move the Slider all the way to the right and pretty much change the amount of space the effect will be applied to. Look at these very, very thick lines and very thin lines, almost invisible, by going all the way to 1. So, I'm going to put it back to about, oh, about 2. Then what I could do is adjust the Width of those lines so that they're very thick and clunky, or extremely thin and refined and a lot of grain applied. We can also apply Softness to blur that out a little bit, or get rid of it altogether. And, last but not least, we can change the Opacity of the effect so it's not quite so harsh. So, that is how we can use the Cartoon effect. Now let's take a look at how we can build upon this effect. So actually let me go ahead and add a little bit more width to this and take the Softness up a little bit as well. We can go to any other effect and drop it on top of this effect. For example, I can go to Effect, I can go to Blur and Sharpen for example and choose a Fast Blur, and then drag this effect on top of this stack, so I can blur the whole thing out but still have the Cartoon effect applied, and that's pretty important. You can always rearrange the stacking order of your effects in After Effects so that you can combine and make your own effects. So, that is how to use the Cartoon effect.