Manga Studio Debut 3.0

[Rob Williams]

Manga Studio is an extensive art program developed for aspiring manga artists, and has been featured by the popular J-pop magazine Tokyopop. It has an extensive selection of tools available for the manga artist to use at their disposal, which is impressive to say the least. Having all the tools you'll need to create and publish manga from your desktop? Sounds too good to be true!

After checking out Jens review here, discuss it here!

[madmat]

Very interesting article, I've often wondered how the computer graphics folks did their thing, now I know.

I bought a copy of Manga Studio Debut (OSX) a few months ago. I have not used it much since I still need to buy a Wacom tablet first. But its functionality is excellent. I wonder if you can tell the differences between Mac and PC versions. Perhaps, they are the same.

If I am correct, the Mac version is not truely Universal, still designed to run under PowerPC.(I use iMAC 17" Duo Core 2Ghz, 1 GB of RAM). It is somewhat slow to open, save and close.

I hope to read your comment about Manga Studio Pro version.

[Merlin]

This looks interesting.
I use Poser7 from eFrontier along with Photoshop.
If they have a demo I'll try it out

Merlin

I'm considering buying Manga Studio Debut 3.0 and read this review. The program seems great, but it looks like it only uses black and white. Is is possible to change colors? If not, can you ink a picture or comic in Manga Studio Debut, save it, and then color it in another program like Photoshop? Thanks!

Originally Posted by ThatFunnyBunnyGirl

I'm considering buying Manga Studio Debut 3.0 and read this review. The program seems great, but it looks like it only uses black and white. Is is possible to change colors? If not, can you ink a picture or comic in Manga Studio Debut, save it, and then color it in another program like Photoshop? Thanks!

Adobe doesn't fully document their PSD file format so it's sort of a one way process unless you've got a very old version of PS but yes. I've exported multi layer PSD documents from MangaStudio that PS7 opens up just fine. Non-Adobe programs like this are pretty good at producing PSD files to go INto PS, they just only use the features they know how, but they can't keep Adobe from using other features. But as it happens you draw first, then paint so heh, no big deal.

This guy's article may have seemed like cheer leading but the program is that good. There is a one month downloadable trial for the fancy EX version.

Manga studio is all about the drawing, it doesn't paint. Hence it's B&W. But it's the best in class for drawing art. Coloring is left for other programs better suited for that.

It has no painting tools, it has ZERO filters. But it has drawing and sketching tools and it has them up front. They've put a LOT of thought into your work flow. Want your sketch layer in blue but hate drawing in blue, ok touch one button bam the layer is blue line so you can tell it apart from your next layer, touch it again, back to black. One button, horizontal flip (are you skewing things) touch it again, bam back. Rotate the canvas to make drawing her face easier, right on the button bar. It's all about efficient sketching drawing and inking. Not painting with drawing thrown in.

The cool thing for me is it's inking. Both versions have a "corrected" button available for all the drawing tools that smooths free hand drawing on raster or vector layers. That thing is SO awesome it's worth the price all by itself. You get instant feed back. You can watch your line change behind your pen as you continue to draw it, smoothing out all the bumps, zigs and zags. You can turn it off of course and a slider varies it from off to where an attempt to write your name turns into a few loops and smooth curves. Vector perfect lines with the simplicity of freehand drawing.

Both have a simple arc tool drawn with cubic bezier splines instead of quadratic (one control point instead of two). It doesn't knot together dozens of bezier curves so you can spend the day pulling at little handles. Put down the first point, drag to the other endpoint, pick up, set down, there's your one control point, drag it where you want it, pickup, that curve is done. Then you can move on. The end of the line will snap your pen to it for the next line. Your line has a recurve? use two curves, end one at the inflection point, draw the next. Inking with that over your sketches is insanely faster than one giant line with dozens of little handles to pull about. I used to be very good at that, now I wonder, why?

The EX version has a mini poser like thing built in (dummies only, not skinned people). Need your girl character upside down in an air born back flip kick, with her pistol pointing inches from the viewers face? HOURS of stick figures, sketching and erasing to get it just MOSTLY right? Not here. The poser like tool will let you adjust a female dummy to your characters height and basic proportions and then manipulate it right in your drawing to get it COMPLETELY right in five MINUTES. Just wow.

In vector mode (EX only again) you can push, bend and model the lines you create with freehand tool around like in Illustrator, and you can select the thickening/thinning tools and paint with it on the lines you've created to thin or thicken them for the their whole length or just where you want it, blended in nicely with the rest of the line. Hair goes behind the ear not over it? Touch that vector line inside the ear with the eraser tool and it will erase to where the next vector line crosses it. Perfectly.

Did I mention both versions have 1,2 and 3 point perspective guides you can set up, and that you can make your lines snap to them? Rulers you can put on the paper to let you snap lines on diagnals, all parallel or all toward the same point? Same thing with curves. Several of the included rulers are resizable, rotatable, honest to gosh french curves. (I think they were just showing off, any graphics program with a bezier curve implementation blows away a french curve, even the dang teddy bear ruler is probably more useful than that.)

It easily matches any other tool for sketching directly into it instead of using paper then scanning, but with the benefit of cool rulers, perspective tools, the poser like thing.

Since I draw for the web not print, the tones don't hold any interest for me at all.

Can you tell I like this thing?

i just got manga studio debut and dont have a wacom tablet. is it possible to scan the outline of a picture i drew, then edit it and all that stuff on manga studio???