Datasheet

Having thousands of screentones at your disposal
Manga Studio comes preinstalled with thousands of screentones (patterns of
dots or other shapes that are used in black and white artwork to represent
shades of gray) that you can’t get with other drawing programs. In addition,
these tones are
vector based, which means that you can adjust the size of
your finished page to any size you want, and the quality of the tones remains
the same. This is something that even the Computones package for Photoshop
can’t do. (Incidentally, EX users can use Computones in addition to the pro-
gram’s main tones, so there’s another advantage.)
Chapter 11 covers all you need to know about adding screentones to
your work.
Working with multiple-page story files
What if you could contain all of the pages in your story or chapter in one place,
which you could then easily preview as you go along? Manga Studio provides
that with its story files. Here, you can create as many pages as you’d like, and
they’re organized in one location. You can then rearrange the pages, add new
ones, or remove excess ones. And because all the page files are collected
within one story file, all you need to do to view your story is just open one
file, instead of several. Chapter 4 discusses how to work with these files.
Manga Studio EX users also can combine two consecutive pages into a
spread — for those large action pieces you want to draw. (Conversely,
you can split a spread into two separate pages.)
Knowing your page dimensions with print
guides (preinstalled and custom)
Manga Studio includes page templates of various shapes and sizes that are
useful if you’re planning on printing your comic. In addition, for several of
those templates, a set of print guides is included.
The print guide helps you keep track of what areas of the page are safe and
what areas are cut off by the printer when preparing it for the final book. It’s
a very useful way to make sure any important artwork or dialogue isn’t acci-
dentally cut because you didn’t keep track of where the cut-off points were.
I go over the basics of the print guide in Chapter 4.
Creating custom word balloons (EX only)
Many programs offer the ability to add text to a page, but Manga Studio EX
provides you the option of adding word balloons as well. These vector-based
balloons can be squashed, stretched, and fitted to whatever dialogue you want
to add. EX comes with a wide variety of balloon shapes to choose from, but if
you don’t see what you’re looking for, you can always create your own! Check
out Chapter 12 for more information on how the word balloon function works.
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Part I: Welcome to Manga Studio!
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