Engineering professors develop human-AI colorization tool for cartoonists

Shayla Brown — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 17:28:34 +0000

Engineering professors develop human-AI colorization tool for cartoonists Shayla Brown Mon, 03/03/2025 - 12:28

��AV professor Sungsoo Ray Hong has always been a huge fan of cartoons, comics, and animations. By combining his passion with his research area of human-computer interaction, he has created a new tool for cartoonists, ShadowMagic.

Hong, his colleague Yotam Gingold, and their PhD students published a paper, “ShadowMagic: Designing Human-AI Collaborative Support for Comic Professionals’ Shadowing,” elucidating the need for the tool, which aims to boost product quality and designer productivity through study-informed human-AI interaction.

The team worked with professional cartoonists to find common workflow of colorization that is shared within the industry as a reference point for their research, which examines the evolution of designing technology as cartoonists transitioned from using PCs in the 1980s to artificial intelligence, said Hong, who is an assistant professor at the Department of Information Sciences and Technology.

Creating a comic book is a team effort as there are many roles throughout the process including story drafting, sketching, colorizing, editing, and sending to a production company, said Hong.

“Professional cartoonists are sometimes producing content every other day,” said Hong, who is also director of George Mason’s Alignment Lab. “You cannot commit to these kinds of deadlines doing everything by yourself. That's why the colorization industry is so helpful to professional cartoonists.”

Colorization is a sequential process of line drawing, flatting, base colorization, shadows and/or lighting, background and other special effects. The tool stems from a previous project, FlatMagic, another AI-driven tool designed to improve the creative process for digital comic professionals.

“This is a fairly standardized process, especially in South Korea and growing throughout the United States as well,” he explained. “The solutions to these network visualizations should be contextualized, but we have the limited resources. We can’t build everything for everybody. That’s my motivation here.”

Gingold also specializes in human-computer interaction and “has always been interested in sketching and how computers can help us express ourselves,” said the Department of Computer Science associate professor.

Yotam Gingold (left) and Ray Hong in Research Hall, presenting their colorization tool. Photo by Cristian Torres/Office of University Branding.

“We looked at artistic challenges, usually tedious things that aren’t so fun for the artists and break down those problems, so that they can focus more on the creative parts of it,” said Gingold, who is the director of George Mason’s Computational Reality, Creativity, and Graphics Lab.

There are millions of pixels in an image, and if an artist wants to move or change the color of a building for example, they point at one pixel among the millions. The artist wants the rest of the pixels to follow along naturally so the rest of the building should also change, he explained.

“The computers will do the math where we can write formulas to update all the other millions of pixels. Another example would be keeping lines parallel and corners perpendicular, and that’s where a lot of my research comes in,” said.

While a doctoral student at George Mason, Chuan Yan, PhD ’24, was recruited by Gingold for this project and conducted research on sketching and painting. Yan’s area of expertise encompasses computer graphics fundamentals and sketch-related computer vision techniques, which he had learned extensively from Gingold, he explained.

The ShadowMagic tool was built as an Adobe Photoshop plug-in, and since its release, the team “has garnered significant interest from artists inquiring about updates and expressing a strong desire for a tool that could free them from the labor-intensive flatting process,” said Yan, who is currently a postdoc researcher at Stanford University.

“This response is both exciting and humbling. It confirms that our research is addressing a real need in the industry yet also highlights the remaining challenges in making [the tool] ready for widespread adoption.”

Yan believes that as more sophisticated generative AI systems continue to emerge, AI-human collaboration will become increasingly vital.

“I am excited to witness and contribute to this transformation, helping to shape a future where AI acts as a powerful tool that amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it,” he said.

In This Story

Sungsoo Ray Hong

Yotam Gingold

Discover more Artificial Intelligence research from George Mason

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Solving Social Issues with Digital Art at Mason Korea

Emily Schneider — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 18:20:40 +0000

Solving Social Issues with Digital Art at Mason Korea Emily Schneider Tue, 12/07/2021 - 13:20

In This Story

Jared Bruhn

The '1st Social Impact Digital Art Contest' hosted by ��AV Korea, a member of the UN Global Compact, and sponsored by NCsoft, Gen.G Global Academy (GGA), Game Culture Foundation, and Square One is the UN's 'Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs)' is an event prepared to raise public awareness.

The event focused on raising public consensus on social issues in the Corona era and finding solutions using the interactive and storytelling elements of digital media.

Students and faculty stand together at an award ceremony for a contest that presents solutions to social issues through digital art. The contest was held by ��AV Korea and sponsored by NCsoft & Gen.G Global Academy of Korea. (Photo: ��AV Korea)

The works submitted to this contest, with total prize money of 4.6 million won, consist of computer games, animations, comics, drawings, and illustrations that provide solutions to social issues in each field.

The works that went through the fierce first screening were exhibited in a gallery in Square One, Yeonsu-gu, Incheon, and were evaluated by citizens and judged by experts.

The judging was conducted by Jared Bruhn and John McGrew, professors of Computer Game Design at Mason University Korea and external experts in the field."

The content of the evaluation was evaluated based on social value, completeness, workmanship, and originality, and the first to third places were selected in high school and college divisions, respectively.

In addition, popular awards in each category were selected through a citizen vote held at the exhibition hall.

Si-yeon Park (2nd year student at the Department of Creativity Soft) from Sejong University's BHP Team, who won the top prize in the college department, said, "I made the work 'With' in hopes that someone will agree. I believe that content can change the world, and I will make better works in the future.”

Robert Matz, president of ��AV Korea, said, “Through the creative ideas presented by students, it was interesting to see how popular culture can be used for better education and society. I hope it will serve as a good opportunity to raise public interest in social issues.”

Meanwhile, Guan Wang, president of Gen.G Global Academy (GGA), which sponsored the event, said in an encouraging speech, “This contest is a good example of converting students’ interest and passion for games into social contribution.” “Korea We are delighted to be collaborating with ��AV to organize this contest. I hope we can continue to collaborate more in the future.”

This article originally appeared in Woori Ilbo (South Korea) and has been translated into English.