Manga Studio EX 4 (Mac/PC CD)

Product Details

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• ASIN: B001O2SP0A
• Release Date: 30 Jan 2009
  

By : Smith Micro Software
Price : £112.90

Product Description

Manufacturer's Description
Manga Studio EX 4, the world's leading comic and manga creation software, delivers powerful art tools for every manga and comic artist. Save time and increase productivity with customizable tool palettes. Draw naturally with a pen tablet and invigorate your drawings using color and built-in special effects. Import 3D objects and render them as backgrounds for your artwork. Import and export to most popular file formats, and publish professional quality manga for print or web. Manga Studio EX 4 offers thousands of screen tones, professional drawing and coloring tools, and in depth layout and rendering capabilities, making it an essential tool for professional Comic and Manga artists.

 

Manga Studio EX 4 (Mac/PC CD)

 

Product Features

• Sketch, scan or import your artwork!
• Digital inking: Ink your drawings with precision using unlimited layers!
• Choose from over 3,000 screen tones or create your own.
• Resize with no loss in quality by converting bitmap drawings to resolution-independent vector images.
• Draw naturally with a pen tablet.
• Save time by simplifying your design process with built-in rulers and other easy-to-use features!
• Color artwork using the integrated tool set enabling you to mix and blend colors!
• Add speed line and focus line effects in seconds to express motion or moods.
• Apply distortions and special effects to your artwork using advanced filters.
• Convert 2D images to line and tone data by using the 2DLT Rendering function.
• Import 3D objects and easily transform them into tone and line drawings by using the 3DLT rendering function.
• Output professional Manga and Comics to a wide variety of popular file formats.

Customer Reviews

Bought this in UK, where things are double the USA cost... it was, however going at a bargain price at the time so I rushed an order in.
However, since I bought it, the price doubled, hung there for a while and now has plummeted to less than I paid for it. This may concern some prospective purchasers who have therefore got in on some part of the "do I buy now - or wait?" continuum of dilemma. Who knows where it will go next.
The programme, er, program:
In essence, the perfect natural pen and pencil simulation software. Wow Really. Amazing.
specifics?
The pdf manual is disgusting. Near useless: translated by someone who was not part of the team that translated the GUI, so everything is slightly different like it's referring to a different version of the software.
As the manual occupies the same work area as the artwork, it would be preferable to run this on an e-book reader. The current pdf is totally incompatible with this.. it's been formatted as a ghastly 2 column layout which is ONLY good for printed output.
It needs either a printed manual, one or two column, translated by someone from the English side of the desk or a similar e-book - in single column.
In the meantime, a good html manual might help.
Hurrrrah! this runs on osx 10.4 on a PPC, unlike most of the fashion-slave software which will only run on an operating system that won't run itself.
Amazon, please fix the product spec. It's a real plus point.
Apart from the crap manual and the slightly unusual GUI (which is very like Photoshop in some basic ways and oddly different in others, so it's harder to intuit the advanced features and therefore a manual is necessary once you're working beyond newbie capabilities,) this is a stunning, superb and capable piece of software. Not just for manga. Not just for comix. This is a great all round illustration program for everything but the finishy - softy, blurrified, transparent reflecty things for which you'll probably still need Photoshop to finish off.
For comic illustration, layout and pre-press it is absolutely amazing. It does stuff with tones, panels and speech in balloons that would have driven a traditional illustrator expensively insane over a very long time.
No more:
Ben Day cut and paste tones, Letraset rub-down halftones, Letterpress-printed baryta proofs to cut out and rubber cement into place.. ruling pens full of no-mistake, one-shot, unerasable Indian Ink. No fingermarks, blots or stray lines. Physical, fragile artwork, wicking paper... darkroom drudgery... storage problems, expensive kamikaze couriers, editing=starting again
nightmares
Some of this stuff has gone away gradually; some has hung on, like halftone patterning with mechanical tints. MS pretty much wraps up the last of the big problem areas in black and white illustration and makes them accessible digitally.
BIG step forward.
These things can now be generated - in layers, so non-destructively - by functions dedicated to the task which I am slowly learning to drive (Damn that manual) but which I have full confidence will do the job correctly and without compromising creativity.
It needs a good tablet to get the best out of, otherwise you're better off with Photoshop.
I finally found a substitute for white scraperboard in Manga Studio. This is not the black, scrape a white (or metallic) line stuff normally seen in craft and toy stores. This is the plain white clay-faced board that the black type is factory painted in order to create. No, this is pure white Unobtaneum that is drawn on in india ink so it can then can be scrape-erased, just like the black stuff, but with the predominant background areas starting white. With this, very fine engraving-type illustrations can be produced that print in a solid, monochrome ink yet can have the illusion of delicate, continuous tonality, like the metal-plate illustrations done by master engravers in Victorian times.
A bit of tweaking in Manga Studio and you can produce the same effect with a Wacom. Editable. Stunning stuff.
I love it. I hate the manual.

Haven't used it myself, but my girlfriend and her friend have made a LOT of use out of it. It's pretty damn good. Only used it on Windows 7, so can't comment on how it is on Mac, but I assume it's exactly the same either way.
User interface isn't bad, but it did take them a while to get used to. Not everything they were looking for was right in front of them, but it was, at most, two clicks away so it was fine after about 10 minutes of just messing around.
It was their first time using a Wacom Bamboo and Manga Studio 4, and they made some pretty nice stuff!
I recommend.

 

Manga Studio EX 4 (Mac/PC CD)