A photograph is full of detail a drawing does not have. So the picture
is taken apart and put back together in three pieces: the outlines are
traced, the colour underneath is flattened until the detail is gone,
and then the outlines are laid back over the top.
The outlines are traced from the original photograph, before
anything is flattened. An eye, a nostril and the line of a mouth all
live in exactly the detail that flattening destroys — trace
first and a face still has a face in it.
The looks
The sliders
- Outline
- How weak an edge still gets a line
- Line width
- How thick that line is drawn
- Colours
- How many shades are left in the picture
- Flatten
- How hard the detail is smoothed away first
- Colour punch
- How loud the colour is, 100% being as it was
A look is only a starting point for those five. Move any of them and
the picture follows; Start this look again puts them back.
Where your picture goes
Nowhere. It is opened by this browser, drawn on this computer, and
saved back to this computer. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is kept
— close the page and it is gone. That is not a promise about how
we behave, it is how the page is built: there is no route on our
server that accepts a picture.
Saving it
Save the picture draws the whole thing again at a larger size
than the one on screen and hands it to your browser as a PNG file.
Large flat colour with hard edges is the one thing JPEG is worst at,
so PNG it is — and on a cartoon it is usually the smaller file
anyway.