Flatting is a stage in digital comic colorization for filling regions with base constant colors before adding further effects.
This stage is important for making high-quality color comics.
However, this stage is also very time-consuming, labor-intensive, and not where artists feel creative.
Flatting is tedious because converting a line drawing to an industry-standard level of flatting cannot be easily done using basic tools
such as the fill bucket, brush, lasso, or magic wand.
Artists must manually fix inaccurate region boundaries and dirty bucketing results caused by anti-aliased line drawings.
We proposed FlatMagic, an AI-driven comic flatting tool integrated into Adobe Photoshop.
Our pre-trained neural network generates high-quality flatting regions that can be filled with simple bucket interactions
For example, here are the un-colored regions suggested by FlatMagic.
Users only need to click to colorize regions with the bucket fill tool.
In some cases, FlatMagic's suggested regions may be imperfect.
FlatMagic anticipates this by also providing finer-grained regions.
With a few more clicks, artists can choose the right colors.
If the finer regions still aren't right, artists can tweak the region boundary with a drawing interaction and then fill it.
The video shows how FlatMagic can significantly accelerate users’ flatting while still keeps the high quality.
Through the two rounds of studies, we found using FlatMagic significantly reduced a professionals' effort by nearly 30%, compared to their current best practice
For more details, please check out our paper. Thanks for watching the video.