: What make the colors in this picture look soft? See this image: http://soranootoshimono.wikia.com/wiki/File:46456845235358656364.png To me it look soft like some sort of low-pass filter but I also

@Jessie844

The colours are not soft as such, though they are pastels; but the shadows are simply a darker version of the "original", and there are careful use of highlights. Consider the clothes:



The outlines are trad cartoon-black. If you removed the shadows and kept the black outlines, you would have old-school-western donald-duck-style cartoon.

Really old Donald Duck, has the shadows as an "overlay" of gray-to-black:



"Modern" (well, to me anyway) versions do the same as manga: shadows are just darker colours of the highlights, hence the softness:




Edit:
In response to some of the comment; I actually do not see a blur. What I do see, is outlines that are not entirely black, and in some cases, the outline colour is adjusted to fit the "content" of that object. Note that some of the outlines are brown-ish, others are blue-ish etc.

I could of course be wrong.

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