I usually reserve the fun stuff for weekends, but this was too hot to wait. If you’ve got an iPhone and like to play around with photos, you’ve got to check out the ToonPAINT app. You can use the camera or open an image from your photo gallery and it converts it to a comic-book styled image. You’ve seen this style before. It first showed up in the Charles Schwab commercials, and then soon after in the film adaptation of Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (appropriately set in Orange County).
ToonPAINT does a damn good job without any manipulation. If you want, you can colorize the images afterwards, but even without doing so, you get some pretty interesting results.
Here’s a quick test I ran with a photo of my daughter Bethany and my eldest son Dan, taken a few years ago in Laguna Beach.
Other than cropping the “toon” version a little tighter, I didn’t do any further editing to the generated image. Not bad for a completely automated conversion!
You can get ToonPAINT here. It’s not free, but it’s worth the 2 bucks for the entertainment value if nothing else.
If you give it a try, post a link to your experiments in the comments below.
I Love how taht turned out! I use an action in Photoshop, but this ToonPAINT has a different look that is quite attractive!
It’s amazing what you can do on a phone these days. Especially with photos. My digital camera seems positively “dumb” in comparison to the iPhone.