How do I keep the colors of my inks?

[Lex W]

I sketched and inked all of my frames in a separate program and exported them individually. So this is pretty much ready to be colored. I tried importing the frames into OpenToonz, but when I convert the levels to vectors, I can't keep the Red and Blue lines I've drawn for shading.

I need the inks to stay red and blue so I can color the animation easily. How do I do that? (Also how do I resize ALL of my raster cels for inking??? Not talking about zooming the camera either)

[Herbert123]

The trouble is that you used anti-aliased lines while drawing - OpenTOonz cannot deal with those, and retain the colours during the conversion to vectors. Nor can you import this in a Toonz raster level: again, because of the anti-aliasing.

Solving this requires the removal of the anti-aliasing. Which is harder than it sounds. I tried to remove the anti-aliasing from your line art semi-automatically in Photoshop (posterize), Photoline, and attempting to use several other methods, but none gave satisfactory results. In the end I resorted to selecting each colour with the "Select Colors" method, convert to a selection, invert the selection, copy and paste to a new layer, and finally protect the transparency and filling the layer with blue, red, or black to make certain no other colour values are left behind.

I automated this for the most part with an action in Photoline, so it does not take too much time per frame. This should also work in Photoshop. Then export the images, and make sure the files are named name.XXXX.tiff or something (starting with 0001).

And to prove it works with aliased, pure coloured line art, I attached a screengrab of your first frame with the settings that work best. However, the resolution of your demo file was too low for a good quality conversion. Best work at a high resolution. Clip Studio works really well for this type of work: draw multiple monochrome layers at high resolution, and each layer can be set to a different colour. Animation is also supported. Then export the sequence to OpenTOonz for vector conversion.

[Herbert123]

Btw, which program did you use to create the line art?

[Lex W]

Drew the inks in FireAlpaca

thanks for the info btw, I'm sure I can manage fixing all these errors using your methods with GIMP ^^

Update: So I can fix all this by making my layers transparent and using a threshold filter. Seems to be working fine.

[Lex W]

New update:

The removing the anti-aliasing doesn't seem to be doing much when converting to Vectors in Opentoonz. I still can't keep the red and blue lines. I've even tried copying the settings in your screenshot but it doesn't work for me.

Additionally, OpenToonz loves to crash every other time I try to edit the "convert to vector" settings, so there's that.

I'd love to take a screenshot of the problem just as soon as OpenToonz stays open long enough to not crash.

[Lex W]

OKAY SO AFTER TONS OF FIGHTING WITH THIS PROGRAM, I FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT

(Sorry for the caps. I was very frustrated. OpenToonz crashed on me many times.)

So first thing: I completely edited my animation frames so that their resolution would match my output settings. 1280x720 pixels, 64DPI.

Next: Cleanup settings. I didn't know about this part, and spent hours figuring it out. Apparently, you have to change your cleanup settings from "Grayscale" to "Colors." And then you have to add the colors that you want preserved (in my case, Blue and red.)

Then: Actual cleanup (preview highly recommended) will convert the frames to a Toonz Raster File with the Cleanup settings specified.

LAST: "Convert to Vectors" I finally got it to work. Good Lord.

Not gonna lie, now I'm not sure if the anti-aliasing thing is valid, but I'll test that another time and post the results here if/when I do.

[Lex W]

Update: Anti-aliasing doesn't really matter much with converting frames to vectors. Just have to clean up the frames with the right settings first is all. Here's one of my un-edited frames that I've edited for my output settings:

My cleanup settings:

And then the Vector Conversion Settings:

[Herbert123]

Thanks so much for figuring this out - I was not aware of those options in OT. Extremely useful to know.

[TurtleTooth]

I'd love to see the final work.

[Rodney]

Thanks for sharing your experience.

It may have been painful to figure it all out but I'm pretty sure you just saved a lot of folks similar frustration by letting us know what worked best for you.

I had only started to experiment with using color and I'm looking forward to doing it again with consideration of your settings and how well they worked.

I'd like to see the end results of your animation too as that is a great style you've got going.