CLIP STUDIO READER LAB.
Celsys invests in R&D with the goal of improving both the creative workflow for manga and illustration production and the reading experience for consumers.
The new automatic shading technology applies shadows to digital drawings with a line art layer and a flat color layer. The direction and angle of the light and color of the shadows can be adjusted for a natural effect. This automatic shading technology was developed based on joint research with University of Tsukuba’s Chaos Lab.
■Chaos Lab, University of Tsukuba
https://www.chaos.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/
The drawing area detection technology can extract the range of a line drawing by simply enclosing the general area with the tool. Due to the simplicity of black-and-white drawings such as manga, previously it has been difficult for auto-select tools difficult for auto-select tools to distinguish the white background from the white within the drawing, so the task of extracting black and white drawings has been done carefully by hand and required manual skills. With this new technology, Celsys hopes to make the detection and extraction of these images more efficient so that manga drawings can be more easily used in promotional videos and webtoons.
Research was done on detecting panels within the pages of a manga to efficiently compile data on how to display works vertically panel-by-panel. This is the optimal way to read manga in a vertically scrolling format, typified by the webtoon format, which has attracted attention recently as a way to effectively display manga drawn on a page.
The research focused on detecting the faces of characters and other figures depicted in manga, allowing for more effective presentation by locating the characters’ faces, which are important elements in the works.
