Region-Aware Color Smudging

TL;DR

This paper introduces SmartSmudge, a novel color smudge tool that simplifies shading in digital painting by enabling real-time region selection and dynamic brushes, improving efficiency especially for non-professional users.

Contribution

The paper presents a new smudge tool with real-time region selection and dynamic brushes, based on a formative user study, enhancing shading efficiency in digital painting.

Findings

SmartSmudge improves shading efficiency in digital painting.

User study shows increased ease of use and natural shading effects.

Quantitative analysis confirms effectiveness over traditional methods.

Abstract

Color smudge operations from digital painting software enable users to create natural shading effects in high-fidelity paintings by interactively mixing colors. To precisely control results in traditional painting software, users tend to organize flat-filled color regions in multiple layers and smudge them to generate different color gradients. However, the requirement to carefully deal with regions makes the smudging process time-consuming and laborious, especially for non-professional users. This motivates us to investigate how to infer user-desired smudging effects when users smudge over regions in a single layer. To investigate improving color smudge performance, we first conduct a formative study. Following the findings of this study, we design SmartSmudge, a novel smudge tool that offers users dynamical smudge brushes and real-time region selection for easily generating natural and efficient shading effects. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed tool via a user study and quantitative analysis