Mr. Campbell, you are a TON of help on this site. Seriously, you may not notice it, but your expertise has been a godsend to me. Between you and Jason Quest I've learned a lot.
And I know I still have a long way to go.
By the way, I've been invited to an Adobe workshop (partnered with Wacom) in San Francisco.
I'll report what I get to play with at this session they're creating.
Mr. Campbell, you are a TON of help on this site. Seriously, you may not notice it, but your expertise has been a godsend to me. Between you and Jason Quest I've learned a lot.
I was using the pencil tool on a layer set up as "blue" no matter what colour - other than white - I would use on that layer. Guess what colour the pencil tool kept switching to.
I was using the pencil tool on a layer set up as "blue" no matter what colour - other than white - I would use on that layer. Guess what colour the pencil tool kept switching to.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe it's switching somehow to the secondary color you have selected? If so, setting that to something-that-isn't-white would at least make it less of a problem?
I just purchased Kyle's water color brush preset for Photoshop. $9 bucks. The brushes are amazing, really looks like water color. I'm gonna use them on my new series.
I've started catching glimpses of what I might be doing wrong here. When I'm in the middle of laying down the "ink", the cursor suddenly switches from the "dot" to the "eyedropper" icon for a fraction of a second. Wondering if I'm not triggering the mode to sample the color the "pen" is hovering over by accident.
I've been doing well with the brushes that come with it. I adjusted the pressure curve on a couple of them to get a better range of thin/thick lines with my stylus and the amount of pressure I'm comfortable with, but that's it.
The good news is that the developers have been working on the program's weak text-handling.
The bad news is that much of what they've added is useless. For example, it will now auto-wrap text pasted into a box... but it doesn't break on word boundaries, it just cuts wor ds in two. Because that's not an issue in Japanese, I suppose. They've added a feature for mixing vertical and horizontal text in a way I can't imagine wanting to do. (Do they do that much in Japan?) The options for adjusting proportions and character spacing are welcome, but they aren't of much value if you already have a font that looks good. No ability to rotate text at an angle, or a tool to automatically wrap a baloon around a block of text. Oh, and they added features for drawing animation, which is exactly not what comics illustrators were crying out for.
The other good news is that the program is no longer going to be called "Manga Studio" in North America, and "CLIP Studio PAINT" everywhere else.
The bad news is that they're going with "CLIP Studio PAINT" worldwide. So instead of a name that gave a slightly misleading impression of what it's for ("no, you can draw western comics with it too"), it will have a name that gives NO impression of what it's for and sounds like three random words pulled out of a hat. Engrish rules at Celsys.
To be fair, I should add that the new version is supposed to use smaller file sizes. That's just good news.
I'll confess the addition of animation tools gives me fear of Photoshop-style bloat. I'm generally unenthused by recent developments with Manga/Clip Studio.
I will take some time in May to sit down with it and try to use it again. I have to ask, and I don't know if it's been asked before, but does it export to pdf at all?
The old Manga Studio 4 had that feature, but they haven't added it to MS5/CSP. CSP can export a book to Kindle or ePub format, however.
I suspect they didn't include PDF because there are other ways to do that. On a Mac there's an option on the Print dialog to send the output to a PDF file instead of a printer. On Windows 10, there's virtual printer that does the same thing. On earlier versions of Windows you can get the same functionality by installing Adobe Acrobat or a free utility such as CuteFTP Writer. These aren't going to produce optimized PDFs, using embedded fonts and resolution-independent vector balloons, but they get you file that'll open on any PDF-capable device, if that's the goal.
I'm not a fan of the print to file option, because there aren't any options as to what type pdf I'm creating. In InDesign I have the option to output to a traditional print pdf or a pdf for web for example, then there are also all kinds of sampling options and things like that that I can also adjust as I need to.
I'm running it on a 2Ghz Core5 system with 4MB RAM. The only thing I've noticed it being slow at is saving pages, but I'm pretty sure that's because my current story (which I started working heavily on around the time I switched from MS 5EX) has a whole bunch of hi-res photos imported as backgrounds, so the files are huge. For what it's worth, I don't usually have other stuff open at the same time: it's my drawing-only tablet.
What the hell happened to MediBang paint? After the latest OSX update it doesn't respond as well. A ton of lag and skipping. I know I have not been on it in a while, but this is not cool. IPad Pro.
Comments
http://www.zombieyeti.com/free-manga-studio-5-ink-brush-pens/
I'm not even beginning to explore one-twentieth of what this is capable of, probably.
The good news is that the developers have been working on the program's weak text-handling.
The bad news is that much of what they've added is useless. For example, it will now auto-wrap text pasted into a box... but it doesn't break on word boundaries, it just cuts wor
ds in two. Because that's not an issue in Japanese, I suppose. They've added a feature for mixing vertical and horizontal text in a way I can't imagine wanting to do. (Do they do that much in Japan?) The options for adjusting proportions and character spacing are welcome, but they aren't of much value if you already have a font that looks good. No ability to rotate text at an angle, or a tool to automatically wrap a baloon around a block of text. Oh, and they added features for drawing animation, which is exactly not what comics illustrators were crying out for.
The other good news is that the program is no longer going to be called "Manga Studio" in North America, and "CLIP Studio PAINT" everywhere else.
The bad news is that they're going with "CLIP Studio PAINT" worldwide. So instead of a name that gave a slightly misleading impression of what it's for ("no, you can draw western comics with it too"), it will have a name that gives NO impression of what it's for and sounds like three random words pulled out of a hat. Engrish rules at Celsys.
To be fair, I should add that the new version is supposed to use smaller file sizes. That's just good news.
I suspect they didn't include PDF because there are other ways to do that. On a Mac there's an option on the Print dialog to send the output to a PDF file instead of a printer. On Windows 10, there's virtual printer that does the same thing. On earlier versions of Windows you can get the same functionality by installing Adobe Acrobat or a free utility such as CuteFTP Writer. These aren't going to produce optimized PDFs, using embedded fonts and resolution-independent vector balloons, but they get you file that'll open on any PDF-capable device, if that's the goal.
I'm running it on a 2Ghz Core5 system with 4MB RAM. The only thing I've noticed it being slow at is saving pages, but I'm pretty sure that's because my current story (which I started working heavily on around the time I switched from MS 5EX) has a whole bunch of hi-res photos imported as backgrounds, so the files are huge. For what it's worth, I don't usually have other stuff open at the same time: it's my drawing-only tablet.
Even if it's only for the extended text editing options.