by Satori·VFX
Images © Satori. Used for product review; image policy.
Sitting at rank 134 on aescripts, Curve Tracer earns its place for converting live footage into contour-based, hand-drawn styling, with separate control over main, lighting, sketching, and ghost curves.
Curve Tracer traces your footage with contours to bring a hand-drawn feel to your work, spanning styles from pencil drawings to abstract sketching. You can start from scratch or apply one of twelve presets, then shape the result with curve width in pixel units and a solid or dashed line style, where dashed renders as a series of short strokes.
The effect works with several contour types. Main, lighting, and sketching contours each carry their own color and opacity, while lighting adds coverage and scale controls that add and accentuate lighting lines. A Source Color Mix setting blends chosen colors with colors projected from the source image, and smoothing options refine the curves.
Ghosting layers past or upcoming frames as ghost contours alongside the current frame, with strength, color, and opacity settings. Halo adds a Gaussian-blurred soft halo over the curves, with a size control and a separate highlight halo, and Composite On Original overlays the source image over the final render using additive or normal blending. Curve Tracer runs across After Effects and Premiere Pro from CS6 through the 2025 releases.
Curve Tracer is best for adding a hand-drawn, sketched, or pencil-style contour look to footage in After Effects and Premiere Pro.
Curve Tracer is completely free to download and use.
Curve Tracer supports a wide range of Adobe releases, from CS6 through the 2025 versions of both After Effects and Premiere Pro, and includes CC, CC 2014 through CC 2019, and the 2020 to 2024 builds. That range covers most current and legacy installations of either application, so you can apply its contour tracing whether you are on a recent subscription or an older perpetual build. Check the developer's page to confirm the exact build you are running is on the supported list.
Curve Tracer 1.1.0, released on August 11, 2023, introduced a Ghosting feature that renders past or upcoming frames together with the current one. The same update fixed a crash affecting the unregistered version on compositions taller than 4096 pixels, disabled Sketch Contour parameters when that feature is not applied, and updated the aescripts framework to version 4.0.7 for more stable license checks. Earlier releases addressed native Apple Silicon support for After Effects and registration fixes.
Curve Tracer's Ghosting feature layers additional frames, rendered as ghost contours, over the current frame. A Strength control defines how many individual frames are included, while separate Color and Opacity settings govern how those ghost contours appear. Added in version 1.1.0, it can render past or upcoming frames alongside the one being processed. This works together with the plugin's other contour types, including the main, lighting, and sketching curves, each of which has its own color and opacity controls.
Curve Tracer is listed as free in this catalog. Licensing terms can change over time, so for current cost, registration details, and any watermark or trial conditions, check the developer's page on aescripts. The 1.1.0 changelog notes a watermark issue on the unregistered version for compositions over 4096 pixels tall that was fixed as a crash, so registration behaviour is worth confirming directly with the developer before relying on it in production.
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