The Mural plugin from the Paint Effects collection creates a smooth painting style with strong edges. The result is so appealing, it can be used both to create a strongly stylized look as well as subtly enhance regular video sequences.

Let’s explore to see what it can do.

We start with a video that is already quite photogenic and see if we can turn it into art.

Original Image

Drop the Mural effect on the clip and choose the Reset to none preset. It shouldn’t look to interesting at this point. A big culprit is the Blend control which mixes between the original picture and the paint effect. It is turned all the way down, effectively disabling the effect.

Drag the Blend control all the way up to 100.

Adjust Blend Control

This enables the effect, but it’s still not doing much to speak of. The heart of Mural are the Smoothing and Shading controls.

Turn up Smoothing to about 70:

Smoothing to 70

Look closely at the two pictures and compare to see what Mural is doing. It is blending together parts of the image that similar in color and shade, while leaving lines and edges clearly defined.

Note that if you drag Smoothing too high, even the edges start to blur together and the image starts looking more out of focus than anything else. This is important to note: Depending on the image, the upper limits of Smoothing will vary.

Now, turn up Shading, also to about 70:

Shading to 70

Shading is a little more subtle, but still very important. It highlights the changes between the smoothed textures by increasing the gradients between dark and light, giving more definition and contrast to the image.

Okay, let’s take a look at the first three controls: Color, Brightness, and Contrast.

Color, Brightness, and Contrast

These controls adjust the color and light characteristics of the video prior to Smoothing and Shadow processing. Color adjusts the amount of color information in the image.

Just for grins, turn Color all the way up:

Color turned way up

This highly saturates all the color information in the picture.

Hmmm… We want something romantic, not Saturday morning cartoony.

Try going in the other direction and turn Color down all the way to completely remove color:

Color turned way down

Wow, those teeth are white! Okay, for this shot, we want a little color, so we drag it back up to about -25.

Finally, Brightness and Contrast are great for fine tuning the light levels just right to make the most of the Mural effect. We turn down Brightness a tad to -15 and drag Contrast up the same amount to get this:

Brightness reduced, Contrast increased

Nice. Compare this with the original. Mural has taken a perfectly decent video and turned it into a glamour shot, albeit perhaps of the Roger Rabbit variety… which leads to one last inspiration… Can we apply Mural in a subtle way to give the picture a Hollywood look without making it too obvious, almost as if the scene were shot with great makeup and lighting?

That’s where the Blend control comes in. Use it to mix in the original video image to bring back enough of the original realism.

So, we turn down the Blend control to about 40:

Final Result

Okay, this looks good. It’s hard to tell this is painted until you compare with the original image.

So, although Mural is intended as a painting effect, it’s also a powerful way to enhance reality.