# Illustrate Module

Illustrate is the finishing module — where a study turns into something closer to a finished, stylised piece rather than an analysis tool. Unlike the other modules, its two viewers — **Processed** (the finished illustration) and **Palette Map** (just the colour swatches it settled on) — share one single settings panel, so every adjustment below updates both at once.

![Illustrate applied to the reference photo at basic settings](examples/illustrate-processed.jpg)

*The Processed viewer at default settings — flat colour, poster-like shapes, and a crisp outline around every region.*

The panel is organised into four groups.

## Simplify

Controls how much the photo is smoothed into clean shapes before any colour is applied.

- **Smoothing Strength** — how much to settle the shapes; higher melts fussy texture into clean colour masses.
- **Edge Crispness** — how firmly the boundaries between regions are kept while smoothing inside them; low feels painterly, high feels graphic and posterised.
- **Detail Cleanup** — wipes out small specks and lone pixels left after smoothing; turn it up for a cleaner, more graphic look.

## Color

Controls the palette itself.

- **Number of Colours** — fewer makes a bolder graphic poster, more keeps subtler shifts of light.
- **Colour Vibrancy** — pull it down for muted, print-like colour, or push it up for travel-poster pop.
- **Contrast** — how dramatic the light/dark separation is before colours are chosen.
- **Brightness** — lifts or sinks the whole image before colours are chosen.
- **Hue Shift** — rotates the colour wheel before the palette is picked; gentle shifts give golden-hour or cool-mist variants without changing anything else.
- **Palette Selection Method** — how the working palette is chosen: **Balanced** averages the photo well, **Faithful** splits the colour space evenly for a fast, predictable result, and **Accent-loving** keeps rare bright details (a red coat, a yellow sign) from being washed out.
- **Tonal Bands** — snaps each colour channel to a fixed number of steps before colour reduction; leave at 0 for smooth colour, or raise it for a screen-printed feel.
- **Dither Style** — adds intentional speckle when reducing colours: **None** for clean flat colour, **Halftone** for a soft, ordered pattern like cheap print, or **Risograph** for a speckled, painterly texture.

## Edges

Controls the inked outlines, if any.

- **Outline Style** — where the lines come from: **None** for flat colour with no ink, **Around Shapes** for the classic poster look (lines along every colour boundary), **From Photo** to trace the original photograph's contours like a sketch, or **Both** together.
- **Line Strength** — how firmly the outline ink is laid down, from invisible to solid.
- **Line Thickness** — from a hairline up to a heavy brush-pen stroke.
- **Photo Edge Sensitivity** — only matters when Outline Style includes "From Photo" — how sensitive the contour finder is to faint edges in the source.
- **Outline Colour** — near-black by default, but try deep brown for a storybook feel or off-white for a paper-cut look.

## Output

Final finishing touches.

- **Light Falloff** — a subtle top-to-bottom darkening that gives the image a touch of ambient weight at the bottom, like a sky-to-ground shift. Set to 0 for perfectly flat colour.
- **Preserve Quiet Backgrounds** — when on, calm low-detail areas (like clear skies or plain walls) keep their original soft tones instead of being flattened to a single palette colour.

## How to use it

Illustrate works best after you've already made decisions in Value, Shapes, and Color — it's meant to preview a direction, not replace the thinking those modules help with. Start with Simplify and Color to settle the overall look, then decide whether Edges add anything, and finish with Output. Treat it as a quick "what would this look like finished?" check rather than a substitute for the study itself.