Stylize
The eleven Stylize effects — sharpen, edges, emboss, mosaic, scanlines, vignette, glow, drop shadow, outline, fake lighting, and stroke maker.
Reference
- Panel
- Effect Controls
- Section
- Add effect ▸ Stylize
The Stylize family holds 11 effects that rework a layer's appearance rather than only its colour. Most preserve the layer's silhouette; Glow, Drop Shadow, Mosaic, Outline (Stroke) and Stroke Maker are the ones that change alpha, and each is noted below.
The sections below follow the order of the Stylize submenu.
Detail
Sharpen
An unsharp mask over a cross of four neighbouring pixels. The original alpha is kept exactly, so sharpening never alters the silhouette.
The kernel weight. At 0 the effect is a no-op; higher values push the edge boost and the halo around it further.
Find Edges
A Sobel gradient across the three colour channels. The strongest channel response becomes the edge value, and the result is blended over the layer's own colour — producing bright edges over the artwork, not dark lines on a white field. Alpha is untouched.
The blend toward the edge map. At 1 only the edge map remains; at 0 the layer is unchanged.
Emboss
Takes the difference between each pixel's lower-right and upper-left neighbours and renders the result as greyscale relief, premultiplied by the original alpha. The light direction is fixed to the top-left diagonal — there is no angle or direction control.
Scales the diagonal difference.
Amount 0 is not the original image
Amount is a gain on the relief, not a blend against the source. At 0 the difference vanishes and the layer becomes flat mid-grey across its whole silhouette rather than returning to its original colour. Disable the effect, or remove it, to see the layer unmodified.
Pattern
Mosaic
Pixelates the layer by having every pixel read the colour at the centre of its block. Blocks are sampled rather than averaged, so the result is a nearest-neighbour mosaic with hard, exact block colours. The tapped texel is returned whole, so alpha is blocked along with colour and the layer's edges become stepped.
The edge length of each mosaic block. Fractional slider positions are truncated to a whole number when the effect renders.
Scanlines
Darkens the layer with a sinusoidal band pattern running across the frame's height. Colour only is darkened; alpha is untouched, so the layer does not become see-through between bands.
The depth of the darkening. At 0 the effect is invisible.
The number of dark bands across the frame's height.
Vignette
Darkens the layer toward its edges. The falloff is measured from the frame centre, reaching full strength outside Radius and fading inward across Softness. Colour only is multiplied toward black; alpha is untouched, so the vignette darkens the layer rather than fading it out.
The strength of the darkening at the outside of the falloff.
Where the falloff ends, measured from the centre as a fraction of the half-frame. At 1.0 it reaches the midpoint of the frame edge; the corners sit further out, at about 1.41.
The width of the falloff band, measured inward from Radius. Small values give a hard-edged circle; large values give a gradual darkening.
The falloff is circular in normalised frame coordinates, so on a non-square frame the vignette is an ellipse that follows the frame's proportions.
Light and edge
Glow
Extracts the layer's bright areas, blurs them, and adds the blurred result back over the layer. The extraction ramps in over a fixed knee above Threshold; there is no separate softness control for the extraction.
Only pixels whose luminance is above this value glow. The transition into the glow is smoothed over a fixed range above the threshold.
The blur radius of the glow. The slider's minimum is 1, so it cannot be used to switch the blur off — disable the effect instead.
Scales the blurred glow before it is added back.
Glow composites additively and expands alpha: the glow is added on top of the layer's own colour and raises the alpha of pixels that were transparent, so light spills outside the layer's original silhouette. This is what lets a glow read against the layers behind it, and it is why Glow is one of the few effects that changes a layer's shape.
Drop Shadow
Takes the layer's alpha, offsets it, tints it, blurs it, and composites the layer back over the result. Only the silhouette contributes — the layer's own colours never appear in the shadow.
How far the shadow is offset from the layer.
The direction of the offset.
The blur radius of the shadow. At 0 the shadow is a hard-edged copy of the silhouette.
The shadow's alpha.
The shadow's colour.
The offset is rounded to whole pixels on both axes, so a slowly animated Distance or Angle steps between positions rather than gliding. A shadow cast near the frame border smears its edge pixel outward rather than falling off.
Outline (Stroke)
Draws a coloured ring outside the layer's opaque content. Every transparent pixel within Thickness of an opaque one is filled with the outline colour; pixels inside the artwork are returned unchanged, so the outline never eats into the drawing. The test is a hard alpha cutoff, which gives a crisp, aliased edge rather than a feathered one.
The outline's radius outward from the artwork's edge.
The outline's alpha.
The outline's colour.
Thickness has a real cost
The outline is found by scanning a disc around every transparent pixel, so its cost grows with the square of Thickness. High values on a large layer are noticeably slower than low ones; keep Thickness as low as the look allows, particularly during playback.
Stroke Maker
An outline that can sit outside the shape, inside it, or across the edge — with the two widths set independently. Where Outline (Stroke) only ever draws outward, Stroke Maker is what you want for inking a flat-coloured form, where the line usually bites into the shape as well as sitting around it.
Every pixel within Outer Width of the edge on the transparent side, and within Inner Width of it on the opaque side, is painted the stroke colour and composited over what was there. Setting one width to zero gives a purely outer or purely inner stroke.
How far the stroke extends outside the artwork. 0 keeps it entirely inside.
How far it bites into the artwork. 0 keeps it entirely outside, which is Outline (Stroke)'s behaviour.
The stroke's alpha.
Feathers the far side of the band as a fraction of its width. The edge itself stays crisp — a soft line and a soft edge are different things, and inking wants the first.
The stroke's colour.
Fake Lighting
A directional light derived from the layer's own silhouette, so flat colour picks up form. This is the effect for a shape that has been filled solid and reads as a paper cut-out: it gives it a dome without your having to paint any shading.
The shading is worked out from how far the shape extends in eight directions from each pixel. Near an edge the shape is open on one side and the surface tilts away from it; deep inside, the directions cancel and the surface stands up. The result reads as a dome over the whole fill rather than a rim light on the outline.
Where the light comes from, in the picture plane.
How far across the shape the effect looks when working out the form. Low values read only near the edges and give a shallow, rim-lit look; high values read across the whole shape and give a fuller dome.
How much of the shadow and light tints is mixed in. 0 leaves the layer untouched.
0 is a smooth gradient. 2 and above band the shading into that many flat steps — cel shading. Three or four is the usual animation look.
The colour the shaded side is tinted toward.
The colour the lit side is tinted toward.
The tints are blended, not multiplied
The shadow and light are mixed toward their colours rather than multiplied by them. A multiply can only ever remove light, so a blue shadow over a red-orange fill would come out darker and no bluer. You pick a shadow colour and you get it — which is the point of stylised shading, where the colour of the shadow is the whole look.
Both effects want a solid fill
Fake Lighting and Stroke Maker both decide "am I inside the shape?" from a hard alpha cutoff. A soft or heavily grained brush leaves an interior full of half-transparent holes, and both effects will read those as edges — Stroke Maker will outline every dab. They are made for flat fills and hard-edged brushes.