I’ve been experimenting to achieve a nice looking line-art and water-colours conversion of any image, and came up with this. In Photoshop I would use the colour-dodge mode, which does a better job, but Blender’s mix node does not seem to support that (yet?).
Colours are super-sweet and candy, and I am looking for a soft pastel-like colouring effect, as well as the automatic line art. The basic method to achieve the effect: copy original image, convert to greyscale, create a secondary copy, invert, use Gaussian blur, and change the blend mode to color dodge (which is not available). Depending on the pre-processing of the original image, the result can be good to excellent. (At least, in Photoshop). Obviously, adding some masking here and there would improve it as well, but I feel this can be made to look better with some additional adjustments in the noodle.
High resolution images tend to work better - so the low resolution of this image is working against it. Scaling down would anti-alias the lines, and result in less jaggies.
Blender’s version is okayish looking, but any suggestions to improve the effect are very welcome.
lineartv05.blend (586 KB)