Stylize effects

Learn how to use Stylize effects in After Effects, including Brush Strokes, Cartoon, Contour Paint, Emboss, Glow, Mosaic, and more

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Brush Strokes effect

The Brush Strokes effect applies a rough, painted look to an image. You can also use this effect to achieve a pointillist style by setting the length of the brush strokes to 0 and increasing the stroke density. Although you specify the direction of strokes, they’re scattered randomly by a small amount to give a more natural result. This effect alters the alpha channel, as well as the color channels; if you masked out a portion of the image, the brush strokes paint over the edges of the mask.

This effect works with 8-bpc color.

• Stroke Angle: The direction in which the strokes are made. The image is effectively shifted in this direction, which may cause clipping at the layer boundaries. Applying the Grow Bounds effect before the Brush Strokes effect effectively extends the layer's boundaries to prevent clipping.
• Brush Size: The size of the brush in pixels.
• Stroke Length: The maximum length of each stroke, in pixels.
• Stroke Density: Higher densities result in overlapping brush strokes.
• Stroke Randomness: Creates nonuniform strokes. The more randomness, the more the strokes vary from the brush and stroke settings you’ve specified.
• Paint Surface: Specifies where brush strokes are applied:
  • Paint On Original Image: Puts the strokes on top of the unmodified layer. This setting is the default.
  • Paint On Transparent: Causes only the strokes themselves to appear, leaving the layer transparent between the strokes.
  • Paint On White or Paint On Black: Applies strokes over a white or black background.
• Blend With Original: The transparency of the effect. The effect is blended with the original image, with the result composited on top. The higher you set this value, the less the effect is applied to the layer. For example, if you set this value to 100%, the effect has no visible result on the layer; if you set this value to 0%, the original image doesn’t show through.

Cartoon effect

The Cartoon effect simplifies and smooths the shading and colors in an image and adds strokes to the edges between features. The overall result is to decrease contrast in low-contrast areas and increase it in high-contrast areas. The result can be an image that resembles a sketch or cartoon, or the result can be more subtle. You can use the Cartoon effect to simplify or abstract an image for stylistic purposes, to draw attention to areas of detail, or to obscure poor-quality original footage.

An advantage the Cartoon effect has over other effects and techniques that yield a similar result is its superior temporal coherence. This means that the result of applying the Cartoon effect does not vary greatly from one frame to the next if the two frames are very similar.

This effect works with 8-bpc, 16-bpc, and 32-bpc color.

The Cartoon effect works in three stages:

• It smooths the image and removes minor variations using a blurring operation similar to that of the Bilateral Blur effect. Modify the Detail Radius and Detail Threshold properties to control this phase.
• It finds edges in the image and applies a stroke to them, similar to the Find Edges effect. Modify properties in the Edge and Advanced property groups to control how the edges are determined and how the strokes are drawn.
• It reduces the variations in luminance and color in the image, simplifying the shading and coloring. Modify properties in the Fill property group to control this quantization (posterization).

As with any other properties, you can animate the properties of the Cartoon effect. Settings that work well for one part of a scene may not be optimal for another. For example, you may want fewer colors and thicker edge strokes for a close-up of a face than for an action scene with many subjects and a lot of detail.

• Render: Fill, Edges, or Fill & Edges. Determines which operations to perform and which results to display.
• Detail Radius: The radius for the blurring operation that is used to smooth the image and remove details before the operation to find edges. A larger radius for a blur means that more pixels are averaged together to determine each pixel value, so increasing the Detail Radius value increases the blurriness.
• Detail Threshold: The blur operation that the Cartoon effect performs is similar to that used by the Bilateral Blur effect. The radius of the blur is automatically decreased in areas where an edge or other prominent detail exists. The Detail Threshold value determines how the Cartoon effect decides what areas contain features to be preserved and what areas should be blurred by the full amount. A lower Detail Threshold value causes more fine details to be preserved. A higher Detail Threshold value causes a more simplistic cartoon-like result, with fewer details preserved.
• Fill: The luminance values in the image are quantized (posterized) according to the settings of the Shading Steps and Shading Smoothness properties. If the Shading Smoothness value is 0, then the result is very similar to a simple posterization, with sharp transitions between values. A higher Shading Smoothness value causes the colors to blend together more naturally, with more gradual transitions between posterized values, preserving gradients. The smoothing phase considers the amount of detail that exists in the original image so that areas that are already smooth (such as the gradient of a sky) are not quantized unless that Shading Smoothness value is low.
• Edge: These properties determine the basics of what is considered an edge and how the stroke applied to an edge appears.
• Threshold: Determines how different two pixels must be for the Cartoon effect to consider them to be one, either side of an edge. Increase the Threshold value to cause more areas to be identified as edges.
• Width: The thickness of the stroke that is added to the edge.
• Softness: Increase this value to soften the transition between the edge’s stroke and the surrounding colors.
• Opacity: The opacity of the stroke applied to the edge.
• Advanced: Advanced settings related to edges and performance.
  • Edge Enhancement: Positive values sharpen the edges; negative values spread the edges. The enhancement distorts the entire image by warping pixels toward or away from the edges, which has the result of sharpening or spreading the edges.
  • Edge Black Level: When this property is 0, only the pixels that have been identified as being part of an edge receive a stroke; when Render is set to Edges, the image is white except in areas with a pure black stroke. Increase the Edge Black Level property by a small amount to add shades of gray in the Edges phase of rendering. Increase this property by a larger amount to approach a result that resembles white strokes on a black background.
  • Edge Contrast: The contrast in the grayscale representation of the edges.

Color Emboss effect

The Color Emboss effect works like the Emboss effect, but without suppressing the image's original colors.

This effect works with 8-bpc and 16-bpc color.

Contour Paint

Contour Paint effect smears your footage along its edges and reduces colors to flat, hand-drawn-looking fills for a stylized result. Contour Paint analyzes each frame to find the visible flows along the edges, or contours, of the shapes within it. The effect smears pixels along these contours, similar to finger painting, and can posterize the smeared areas into solid color fills. Results range from print-like graphics to highly abstracted imagery.

This effect works with 8-bpc, 16-bpc, and 32-bpc color.

Contour Paint processes the frame via several different stages:

• Detects contours in Image: Contour Paint analyzes the frame to find the edges, or contours, within it, mapping the direction and strength of the contour flow at each edge.
• Modify contours: You can modify and reshape the detected contours before the effect uses them, using controls like Offset Flow Angles, Quantize Flow Angles, or the Freehand Flow Adjustment controls.
• Paint color fills on top: Color Reduction draws flat color fills along the same contour flows using a reduced color palette, controlled by Draw Color Fills and Reduction Method, producing the finished, posterized result
• Smear Image along contours: Contour Paint smears pixels along the contour flow, similar to finger painting, using the Contour Smearing controls to set how far the smear pushes and how abstract the result looks.

• View: Use the View dropdown, which allows you to switch between the Final Result effect output or the internal edge map as Contour Paint sees it. These options will allow you to see intermediate stages in your process and consider how Contour Paint interprets your footage. The Edge Map view displays the edges that Contour Paint detects, as well as the direction and magnitude of the contour flows, indicated by the cyan arrows' direction and opacity. 
  

• External Edge Map: It lets you use edges from a different layer, instead of the layer's own footage, to control Contour Paint smearing. Color Reduction always uses the edges from the layer to which Contour Paint is applied.
  • Take Edges from Layer: This lets you choose a different layer in your composition to supply the edge map, rather than using Contour Paint analysis of the current layer's footage. 
  • Edge Layer Behavior: Set here to Stretch Map to Fit, this control determines how the external layer's edge map is scaled or positioned to match the dimensions of the layer to which Contour Paint is applied when the two layers don't share the same size or aspect ratio. 
    •  Center Map: Positions the external layer's edge map centered on the layer, without resizing it.
    • Stretch Map to Fit: Scales the edge map to match the dimensions of the layer to which Contour Paint is applied.
    • Tile Map: Repeats the edge map in a tiled pattern to cover the layer's dimensions.

• Map Modifications: It lets you fine-tune the edge map's angles and edge strength before Contour Paint uses it to smear and color your image.
  • Offset Flow Angles: Controls rotations and the degree value for fine radjustment that lets you offset every flow angle in the edge map by a set amount.
• Quantize Flow Angles: Control that sets snapping of every flow angle in the edge map to a fixed increment, rather than leaving angles at their original detected or adjusted values.
  •  Off: No snapping applied, flow angles remain as detected or adjusted.
  • 15 degrees: Snaps flow angles to the nearest 15-degree increment.
  • 45 degrees: Snaps flow angles to the nearest 45-degree increment.
  • 90 degrees: Snaps flow angles to the nearest 90-degree increment.
• Edge Strength Adjust: Boosts or reduces the edge strength values Contour Paint detects, which changes what Limit Fills by Edge Strength picks up later.
• Freehand Flow Adjustments: Allows manual paint changes to the edge flow map using a set of brush tools, rather than relying on automatic edge detection.
  • Freehand Flow: Lets you manually adjust the flow map with freehand strokes and animate that flow over time by saving keyframed versions of your strokes at key points.
  • Tools: Three brushes for editing the flow map by hand:
    • Change Contour Flow: Allows you to adjust the directions on the flow map, which appear as green outlines in the Edge Map. 
      
    • Remove Contour Flow: Nullifies the flow map where the strokes are present. At full opacity, it will remove the flow, preventing your image from smearing in those areas. At a low opacity, you can use this to reduce the magnitude of the direction. These strokes are visible as red outlines in the Edge Map.
      
    • Delete Strokes: Lets you click on existing strokes to remove them. The strokes are individual objects, and a single click will remove an entire stroke.
      
• Tool Options: Brush Size and Brush Pressure to control the size and strength of the tool above that is active.

• Contour Smearing: Controls how much the image's pixels get pushed and smeared along the detected contours, using Stylization, Cleanliness, Smear Iterations, and Apply to Alpha to shape the final look.
  • Stylization: Controls how exaggerated the smearing looks. Lower values keep the image closer to its original shapes; higher values push it toward larger, bolder smears that follow the main contours rather than small details.
  • Cleanliness: Controls how much fine detail gets smoothed away. Lower values keep more texture and noise; higher values remove more detail for a simpler, cleaner look.
  • Smear Iterations: Controls how many times the smearing effect is applied in a row. Higher numbers create a more abstract, heavily distorted image, but take longer to render.
  • Apply to Alpha: Smears the pixels in the alpha channel as well as the RGB channels. This can be useful if you have a text or shape layer that doesn't fill the screen, or if you have used Object Matte on an object in your frame and want to stylize it.
    

• Color Reduction: Adds a second layer of stylization by drawing flat color fills over your smeared image, using a limited color palette instead of the image's full range of colors.
• Draw Color Fills: Controls whether and how the color fills are shown. 
  • None: Default state, and you'll just see the original smeared image.
  • Over Smeared Image: Fills layered on top of the smear.
  • Only: Renders only the fills and hides the smeared image.
    
• Reduction Method: Controls how Contour Paint picks which limited colors to use for the fills. 
  • Posterization (K-Means) and Posterization (Median): Reduces the colors to the amount in the Posterization Level control using a frame average sampling technique. Because this is an averaging of colors, you may find these posterization methods highly stylized, and they may change from frame to frame if the colors in the frame change enough.
    
  • Match to Nearest Custom Color: Maps fill to a palette you define yourself.

• Posterization Level: Sets how many distinct colors the K-Means or Median posterization methods can use. Lower numbers mean fewer, more simplified colors; higher numbers mean more color variety.
• Custom Color Set: The palette used by Match to Nearest Custom Color. Use the plus button to add colors, and each swatch can be removed individually. Contour Paint uses color only if it's the closest match somewhere in your frame.
• Fill Rendering: Controls how the color fills look once they're drawn, not which colors or shapes they use.
  • Feathering: Softens the edges of each color fill. Higher values create a smoother, more blended transition between fills instead of a hard edge. 
  • Opacity: Sets how transparent or solid the color fills appear overall. Lower values let more of the layer beneath show through.
• Limit Fills by Edge Strength: Sets which edges are strong enough to receive a color fill.
  • Low Strength: The minimum edge strength needed for a fill to appear.
  • High Strength: The maximum edge strength allowed before a fill stops appearing.

Other effects that works well with Contour Paint

Because Contour Paint uses input pixels to drive many of its looks, adding effects before Contour Paint can influence many of those decisions.

• Shadow/Highlights: Brighten the dark areas of your frame and darken the light areas. This can add much more detail to an image being modified by Contour Paint.

• Unsharp Mask (or any other Sharpening effect): Because Contour Paint works on the edges it finds in the image, using a sharpening effect to emphasize them can produce very different results. You can see here that the colors and shapes of our surfing shots are much more stylized when we pre-process with an Unsharp Mask effect.

Emboss effect

The Emboss effect sharpens the edges of objects in an image and suppresses colors. The effect also highlights the edges from a specified angle. The quality setting of the layer influences the Emboss effect by controlling the Relief setting. Relief is calculated at the subpixel level in Best quality and rounded off to the pixel level in Draft quality.

This effect works with 8-bpc and 16-bpc color.

Emboss effect properties

• Direction: The direction from which the highlight source shines.
• Relief: The apparent height of the embossing, in pixels. The Relief setting actually controls the maximum width of highlighted edges.
• Contrast: Determines the sharpness of the image.
• Blend With Original: The transparency of the effect. The effect is blended with the original image, with the result composited on top. The higher you set this value, the less the effect is applied to the clip. For example, if you set this value to 100%, the effect has no visible result on the clip; if you set this value to 0%, the original image doesn’t show through.

Find Edges effect

The Find Edges effect identifies areas of an image with significant transitions and emphasizes the edges. Edges can appear as dark lines against a white background or colored lines against a black background. With the Find Edges effect applied, images often look like sketches of the original.

This effect works with 8-bpc color and uses GPU acceleration for faster rendering.

• Invert: Inverts the image after the edges are found. If Invert isn’t selected, edges appear as dark lines on a white background. If selected, edges appear as bright lines on a black background.
• Blend With Original: The transparency of the effect. The effect is blended with the original image, with the result composited on top. The higher you set this value, the less the effect is applied to the clip.

Glow effect

The Glow effect identifies the brighter parts of an image and brightens those pixels and their surrounding pixels to create a diffuse, glowing aura. The Glow effect can also simulate overexposure of brightly lit objects. You can base the glow on either the image's original colors or its alpha channel. Glows based on alpha channels produce diffuse brightness only at the edges of the image, between the opaque and transparent regions. You can also use the Glow effect to create a gradient glow between two colors (A and B colors) and to create multicolor effects with looping.

Rendering the Glow effect at Best quality can change the layer's appearance. This change is especially true if you use Adobe Photoshop arbitrary maps to color the glows. Be sure to preview at Best quality before you render the effect.

This effect works with 8-bpc, 16-bpc, and 32-bpc color.

Glow effect properties

• Glow Based On: Determines whether glow is based on color values or transparency values.
• Glow Threshold: Sets a threshold as a percentage brightness to which the glow isn’t applied. A lower percentage produces glow on more of the image; a higher percentage produces glow on less of the image.
• Glow Radius: The distance, in pixels, that the glow extends out from the bright areas of the image. Larger values produce diffuse glows; smaller values produce sharp-edged glows.
• Glow Intensity: The brightness of the glow.
• Composite Original: Specifies how to composite the effect results with the layer. To reduce the layer to glow-only, select None for Composite Original and None for Glow Operation. To achieve a glow effect for text that knocks out (blocks) all layers below it, select Silhouette Alpha for Glow Operation. These glow effects are more noticeable if the image has a feathered edge. 
  • On Top places the glow on top of the image, using the blending method selected for Glow Operation. 
  • Behind places the glow behind the image, creating a backlighting result. 
  • None separates the glow from the image. 
• Glow Colors: The colors of the glow. A & B Colors creates a gradient glow using the colors specified by the Color A and Color B controls.
• Color Looping: The shape of the gradient curve to use if A & B Colors are selected for Glow Colors.
• Color Loops: Creates multicolor ringing in the glow if you select two or more loops. A single loop cycles through the gradient (or arbitrary map) specified for Glow Colors. 
• Color Phase: Where in the color cycle to begin color loops. By default, color loops begin at the origin of the first loop.
• A & B Midpoint: The midpoint specifies the balance between the two colors used in the gradient. Lower percentages use less of the A color. Higher percentages use less of the B color.
• Color A, Color B: The color of the glow if you select A & B Colors for Glow Colors.
• Glow Dimensions: Specifies whether the glow is horizontal, vertical, or both.

The Glow effect uses GPU acceleration for faster rendering.

Mosaic effect

The Mosaic effect fills a layer with solid-color rectangles, pixelating the original image. This effect is useful for simulating low-resolution displays and for obscuring faces. You can also animate it for a transition. At Best quality, the edges of the rectangles are anti-aliased.

This effect works with 8-bpc and 16-bpc color.

Mosaic effect properties

• Horizontal Blocks, Vertical Blocks: The number of blocks in each row and column.
• Sharp Colors: Gives each tile the color of the pixel in the center of the corresponding region in the original image. Otherwise, each tile is given the average color of the corresponding region in the original image.

The Mosaic effect uses GPU acceleration for faster rendering.

Motion Tile effect

The Motion Tile effect replicates the source image across the output image. When you change the placement of the tiles, it uses motion blur to accentuate the movement if motion blur is enabled.

This effect works with 8-bpc color.

Motion Tile effect properties

• Tile Center: The center of the main tile.
• Tile Width, Tile Height: Dimensions of tiles as a percentage of the input layer dimensions.
• Output Width, Output Height: Dimensions of the output image as a percentage of the input layer dimensions.
• Mirror Edges: Flips adjacent tiles to form mirror images. If Phase is set to 0, selecting this option causes the edges of the layer to be mirrored with the surrounding tiles.
• Phase: The horizontal or vertical offset of the tiles.
• Horizontal Phase Shift: Offsets tiles horizontally instead of vertically.

Posterize effect

The Posterize effect posterizes colors; the number of colors is reduced, and gradual color transitions are replaced by abrupt color transitions. You specify the number of tonal levels (or brightness values) for each channel in an image. The Posterize effect then maps pixels to the closest matching level. For example, choosing two tonal levels in an RGB image gives you two tones for red, two tones for green, and two tones for blue. Values range from 2 to 255.

This effect works with 8-bpc, 16-bpc, and 32-bpc color.

Posterize effect properties

• Level: The number of tonal levels for each channel.

Roughen Edges effect

The Roughen Edges effect makes an alpha channel rough and can add color to simulate rust and other kinds of corrosion. This effect gives rasterized text or graphics a naturally rough look, like old typewriter text.

This effect works with 8-bpc color.

Roughen Edges effect properties

• Edge Type: What kind of roughening to use.
• Edge Color: The color to apply to the edge for Rusty Color or Roughen Color, or to the fill for Photocopy Color.
• Border: How far, in pixels, the effect extends inward from the edge of the alpha channel.
• Edge Sharpness: Low values create softer edges. High values create sharper edges.
• Fractal Influence: The amount of roughening.
• Scale: The scale of the fractal is used to calculate the roughness.
• Stretch Width or Height: The width or height of the fractal is used to calculate the roughness.
• Offset (Turbulence): Determines the portion of the fractal shape that is used to create the roughness.
• Complexity: Determines the level of detail in the roughness. Increasing complexity results in longer rendering times. Reduce the Scale value rather than increasing Complexity to achieve similar results.
• Evolution: Animating this setting results in changes in the roughness over time. Although the Evolution value is set in units called revolutions, it’s important to realize that these revolutions are progressive. The Evolution state continues to progress infinitely at each new value. Use the Cycle Evolution option to return the Evolution setting to its original state at each revolution.
• Evolution Options: Provide controls that render the effect for one short cycle and then loop it for the duration of your layer. Use these controls to pre-render your rough elements into loops and thus speed up rendering time. Use the following controls to create a smooth, progressive, nonrepeating loop:
  • Cycle Evolution: Creates a loop that forces the Evolution state to return to its starting point.
  • Cycle: The number of revolutions of the Evolution setting that the fractal cycles through before it repeats. The time between Evolution keyframes determines the timing of Evolution cycles. The Cycle control affects only the state of the fractal, not geometrics or other controls, so you can get different results with different Size or Offset settings.
  • Random Seed: Specifies a value from which to generate the roughness texture. Animating this property causes a flash from one set of fractal shapes to another within the same fractal type. For a smooth transition of the roughness, use the Evolution control.

Scatter effect

The Scatter effect scatters the pixels in a layer, creating a blurry or smeared appearance. Without changing the color of each individual pixel, the Scatter effect redistributes the pixels randomly, but in the same general area as their original positions.

This effect works with 8-bpc and 16-bpc color.

Scatter effect properties

• Grain: The direction in which to scatter the pixels—horizontally or vertically. Select None to scatter pixels in all directions.
• Scatter Randomness: Specifies whether scattering changes at each frame. To animate scattering without keyframes or expressions, select the Randomize Every Frame option.

Strobe Light effect

The Strobe Light effect performs an arithmetic operation on a layer or makes the layer transparent at periodic or random intervals. For example, every 5 seconds, the layer could become completely transparent for one-tenth of a second, or the colors of a layer could invert at random intervals.

This effect works with 8-bpc color.

Strobe Light effect properties

• Strobe Color: The color of the strobe light.
• Blend With Original: The transparency of the effect. The effect is blended with the original image, with the result composited on top. The higher you set this value, the less the effect affects the layer. For example, if you set this value to 100%, the effect has no visible result on the layer; if you set this value to 0%, the original image doesn’t show through.
• Strobe Duration (secs): How long each strobe lasts, in seconds.
• Strobe Period (secs): The time, in seconds, between the start of subsequent strobes.
• Random Strobe Probability: The probability that the strobe operation applies to any given frame.
• Strobe: Select Makes Layer Transparent for each strobe to make the layer transparent. Select Operates On Color Only to use the operation specified by Strobe Operator.
• Strobe Operator: The operation to use for each strobe.

Texturize effect

The Texturize effect gives a layer the appearance of having the texture of another layer. For example, you could make the image of a tree appear as if it had the texture of bricks, and control the depth of the texture and the apparent light source. At Best quality, the texture layer is positioned and scaled with subpixel precision.

This effect works with 8-bpc color.

Texturize effect properties

• Texture Layer: The source of the texture.
• Light Direction: The angle at which light hits the texture.
• Texture Contrast: The magnitude of the result.
• Texture Placement: How the texture layer is applied to the effect layer:
  • Tile Texture: Applies the texture repeatedly.
  • Center Texture: Positions the texture in the middle.
  • Stretch Texture To Fit: Stretches the texture to the dimensions of the effect layer.

Threshold effect

The Threshold effect converts grayscale or color images to high-contrast, black-and-white images. Specify a certain level as a threshold; all pixels lighter than the threshold convert to white, and all pixels darker convert to black.

This effect works with 8-bpc and 16-bpc color.

Third-party effects

Third-party effects in this category included in After Effects:

• CC Block Load effect (CS6 or later)
• CC Burn Film effect
• CC Glass effect
• CC Kaleida effect
• CC Mr. Smoothie effect
• CC Plastic effect (CS6 or later)
• CC RepeTile effect
• CC Threshold effect
• CC Threshold RGB effect