Editor's words Photo to Cartoon

Overview
Since the advent of animated characters of identifiable persons or celebrities, and since the concept of “avatars” or profile pictures started making a big entry into the online existence of users, there’s always been an untamed curiosity on how to stylize or sketch an image through the use of software technology without the condition of knowing how to draw.

The Applications
Caricature soft provides four amazingly simple and efficient tools for this task: Photo to Cartoon, Photo S, Auto Vector and Movie Cartoonizer. Not only can you make pretty drawings to use as avatars, but you can also use these tools for sketching, sampling or showcasing images in a creative way, without needing any artistic skills. The four applications can be downloaded and purchased separately and they work under any version of Windows (from 2000 to 7). Let’s see what each does and why they’re so efficient:

Photo to Cartoon is the simplest way to instantly turn photographs into cartoonish images. Once you load an image, you can adjust the smoothness or sharpness of the cartoon effect, the level of details, change the colors you wish or resize the output file. You can also check the accuracy of the effect by zooming in or out. No artistic or technical skills needed for this instant transformation.

Photo S does pretty much the same as Photo to Cartoon, only that instead of using the color pieces/shapes, it traces the contours of the loaded photo, by turning it into a black and white artistic line drawing.

Auto Vector can be very useful for large prints or vectorial conversions of complex images, but not only. It addresses images with a high level of details such as landscapes or architectural photography and the results are remarkable. The best thing is that you can export your images to a wide range of vector and raster formats like svg, emf, wmf and others, which can be used further.

Movie Cartoonizer is the cutest of them all. Many users think you need technical knowledge and skills to work with high end tools like Premiere or Final Cut to be able to edit videos and turn them into animated moving images. But Movie Cartoonizer makes it so simple and with no unnecessary or redundant features to configure. Indeed, we’re not talking here of long and complex videos to be “cartoonized”, but short videos or webcam captures are the best candidates for this tool. If video editing is not something very familiar to you, a great 6 minutes tutorial is available on the producer’s website, showing you how to edit your moving images frame to frame or by using masks, how to smooth, sharpen or adjust the levels of details or how to define, split or merge individual pieces of the frames. The software is very intuitive and you can quickly enjoy or share your GIF animations or WMV or AVI video files.

The product website is well structured and it provides all the information you need to make an overall impression about what Caricature Soft has to offer. This is a big plus and shows a friendly approach towards any potential user. While the “Gallery” shows a multitude of samples with what the software can do (which speaks much more about the software than any other kind of ad), a really nice feature is the “Online Tools” set, which allows developers to integrate tools like “Crop & Resize” and “Photo to cartoon online” into their websites for free.

Regarding the trial limitations, Caricature Soft has a very decent testing plan, and in this way, Photo to Cartoon lets you save 10 cartoons for free, Photo S allows you to save 30 artistic line drawings, Auto Vector can save 10 high quality vector images and finally, Movie Cartoonizer lets you convert as many videos as you like, but puts a watermark with “Caricature soft” on each saved file. Still, they are more than enough to make you decide if the software is suitable for your needs, or to actually make use of it if you only want a few items to be cartoonized.

Final words
The pricing is also fair, varying between $25 or $49. If you are doing vector conversions on a regular basis and you’re not proficient with photo and digital manipulation software like Photoshop, Caricature Soft is really a good catch for doing your job fast and easy. Being an example of simple but serious software makes Caricature Soft more stable, reliable and trustworthy than any of those glossy eye catching online tools that promise to do the same by requesting you to upload your pictures in unsafe places.