About Chalkaholic

Chalkaholic renders chalk and charcoal type effects with artistic panache and flair. Providing uniquely effective artistic rendering options, Chalkaholic is the essential addition to any digital artist's effects collection.

Using Chalkaholic

Chalkaholic employs an abstract edge-detection and drawing system. This draws some edges in white highlight, others in black shadow, and in-between values in greyscale.

The image on the left shows the interface when the plugin is first run. There are only two controls to worry about.

'Stroke Size' determines the size of the strokes to be drawn which also influences their artistic qualities. Large values creates bright washes of highlights and shadows whereas smaller values creates more outlined images.

'Contrast' specifies the contrast of the midtones. At the default value of 30 midtones have a full dynamic range. Reducing the contrast value pushes the midtones towards white, with a value of 1 creating a two-tone black and white image. Increasing contrast above 30 reduces dynamic range and the midtones tend towards a flat middle value, with a contrast of 75 creating a three toned rendering of white/50% grey/black.

As example of the effect of the plugin, the following shows source image and results.
 

A cheese board

Desert

as a soft chalky rendering

 

sketched in chalk and charcoal

By combining these Chalkaholic rendering with the source images inside your graphics application, dynamic artistic effecets can be created. In the following two example images, the above Chalkaholic results were pasted as a new layer onto the source images with different blending types.
 

with blending set to Luminance

 

with blending set to Dodge

Useful tips :

  • To create softer images, scale your source image to twice it's size before applying Chalkaholic, and then shrink it back down to original size.
  • You can draw on your source image with your graphics application's Smudge tool, which creates brush strokes in the direction you draw them when Chalkaholic is applied.

Source image

 

Smudged with rotary strokes in the fruit shapes

Chalkaholic result from source

 

Chalkaholic result from smudged image

Blended as a Hard Light layer with source, producing a rather noisy image

 

Blended as Hard Light layer with smudged image, producing an abstract oil-paint look
  • The edge-detection system is very sensitive and will pick up JPEG artefacts on highly compressed JPEGs.  The following image shows the wine image used previously but with higher JPEG compression...

Results from high-quality source image

 

Wine saved as a 50% compressed JPEG produces lots of noise in Chalkaholic

    Be sure to use high quality source images

Also available from Little Ink Pot

Turn digital photos into hand-drawn pencil sketches, pen and ink illustrations, and other illustrative styles. The Sketcher Plugin's versatility makes it the ideal choice for quickly creating eye-catching artwork.

 

Create pencil sketches or...

 

 

 

 

...pen and ink illustrations

 

 

For details visit the Sketcher page here

The Chalkaholic Pro plugin builds extra versatility into the original Chalkaholic concept. Chalkaholic Pro provides independent controls for stroke size and artistic abstraction giving greater control of the rendering.

 

Very low abstraction

 

Increasing abstraction...

...produces more varied artistic results...

 

...to dynamic effect.

Chalkaholic Pro also provides user-specified blend modes, and separate colour selection for highlights, midtones and shadows creating more artistic options.
 

For an artistic sunset...

 

...choose yellow highlights and red midtones with Overlay blending

For details visit the Chalkaholic Pro page here