ANR Ink Poster

Overview

Ink Poster stylises an image in three steps. It smooths away texture while keeping edges, flattens each colour channel into a few even tones, and draws dark ink lines where the brightness changes sharply. The result reads like a screen print, a comic panel or a cel-shaded frame.

Use it for stylised sequences, music videos, title backgrounds and animatic-style frames.

Inputs

1. Sourcerequired

   The image to stylise.

2. Maskoptional

   Limits the effect: where its alpha is black, Source shows unchanged.

Output. The posterised, inked image with the Source's alpha, covering the project format.

Quick start

1. Add ANR Ink Poster after your footage.
2. Set Tonal Levels for how many flat tones each channel keeps: fewer is bolder.
3. Raise Smooth Radius to flatten texture, and Color Tolerance to let the smoothing reach across stronger differences.
4. Set Ink Strength for how dark the lines get, and Ink Threshold for how strong an edge must be to get ink.
5. Use Mix to bring back some of the original.

The panel

The node's panel as Nuke shows it, with the values of a new node. Click any control to see what it does; tabs and sections work as in Nuke.

All controls

Tips

• Nuke works in linear light, so even tone steps bunch up in the brights on screen. For steps that look even, convert to sRGB with a Colorspace node before Ink Poster and back to linear after.
• On grainy footage, denoise first or raise Ink Threshold: grain causes speckled ink and tones that flicker between levels.
• Smooth Radius also thickens the ink lines. For fine lines, lower it and raise Color Tolerance to keep the smoothing.

Good to know

• Tones are flattened in the 0 to 1 range: float values brighter than white become white.
• Smoothing and ink follow brightness, not hue: two colours of the same brightness blend together and meet without a line.
• The ink only darkens the image; it has no colour of its own.
• The output covers the project format; Reformat the image to it first if it differs.

Works with

ANR Contour StrokesRepaints the image in short, curved brush strokes that follow its shapes and edges, for a hand-painted or sketched look.ANR Paint DabsRepaints footage or stills as short, overlapping brush strokes in the image's own colours, for painterly looks and stylised sequences.