Ever wished you had the fun of Comic Life handy at all times? Ever been out at a party, family gathering or on public transport and wished you could add your 'comic touch' to a photo? Now you can!
We're giggling with glee to announce Comic Touch for iPhone and iPod Touch. Add various speech balloons and captions to your photos. Choose a fun special effect to warp and bend your family and friends, then email the results to them!
'Chocolate & Chat: Writing for Teens and Young Adults’ tour!
plasq is proud to announce that we are sponsoring authors
James McCann and
kc dyer on their 'Chocolate & Chat: Writing for Teens and Young Adults’ tour.
The tour will go through Western Canadian Rocky Mountains from July 7-15th, 2008, with stops in Banff, Calgary, Red Deer, Cochrane, Kamloops, Salmon Arm and Kelowna. Click here for tour dates.
If you live nearby make sure you go along and say "Hi" for us! You may also enter a draw to win a copy of Comic Life Magiq or Comic Life Deluxe at each stop!
You can follow the authors travels on their websites - James McCann and kc dyer - where they will be doing a comic for each stop when they have a chance, using - you guessed it - Comic Life!
Cranium Comics has recently launched their first four color comic, Brawn #1.
"I used Comic Life on my Mac exclusively to lay out the storyboards, then later when I created and colored all 24 pages of the issue," recounted Anthony Rezendes, the owner of Cranium Comics and co-creator of Brawn.
The comic 'Brawn' focuses on a dockworker named Sam Ross who was reborn as the hero "Brawn" after he was nearly killed in a drunk driving accident.
"Being an illustrator, it saved me quite a bit of time from having to lay all the text bubbles out manually. It made the process of actually creating the comic that much more enjoyable," Mr. Rezendes added.
We think this comic is great! So check out 'Brawn' on the Cranium Comics site or read the first 5 pages on our Comic Life gallery.
It's working for both "print to pdf" and exporting to TIFF
Airy
Keith
Hi Silverone,
I'm a bit confused now-- you're authoring for a website and print at the same time?
Maybe you could explain a little more about the workflow/ what other apps you're using?
When you copy in Max OS X, you're actually copying a PDF file into the clipboard, which is nice, because it means you can copy from Comic Life Magiq and paste into Photoshop (for example) each element as vector objects.
Skitch unfortunately doesn't handle PDF's for greater than screen resolution, it simply will accept them at the original size of the element.
What this means is, if you're just doing something for screen resolution (like a website), then Skitch will be perfectly suitable, by using the steps I listed before. Note: you're not snapping the graphic, you're actually using copy (Command+C) in Comic Life Magiq and Paste (Command+V) into Skitch which means you don't have to recut the object, as long as you complete the rest of the steps to make sure that Skitch puts a transparent background behind your object, instead of a white one.
If you're working in Print resolution, then you should be able to copy and paste your Comic Life Magiq stuff into your application, whether thats Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.
We're definitely working to make this easier in future.
Silverone
Hi Guys,
Yeah, I had tried Preview since they added the masking tool there but that's why I was hoping your new App would take over this easily. My big concern with copy/paste with Skitch is I'm authoring for Print at least 300 DPI in Magiq settings for export so how could copy/paste into Skitch carry over these same DPI settings and then make a Alpha layer? Let me know if this is an issue as I expect it would be with a copy/paste before export solution. Thanks!
keith
Arg - KeynoteKen you're right. Preview is not handling alpha correctly.
Skitch will happily do it:
1. copy from Comic Life Magiq
2. Paste into Skitch
3. Select the custom color (the round one)
4. Set Opacity to 0% (see-through) in the color picker
5. Shift click on the custom color button
Keith
KeynoteKen
Just checked. While Preview can accept the input from a copy out of Comic Life, it currently doesn't have the ability to save as a PNG (or TIFF) with an Alpha Channel when starting with a PDF (the PNG's it creates have white backgrounds unfortunately ). I think the fewest number of steps to a .PNG that hugs your image is either start with a page size that's the right size for your document OR Copy, Paste into Skitch, then make it transparent there.
keith
Hi Silverone,
We'll definitely look at making that easier in future.
Also you can usually simply copy and paste the object you want from Comic Life Magiq into your graphics editing /web design application of choice. For example, Preview has a 'New from Clipboard' option which will do this.
). I think the fewest number of steps to a .PNG that hugs your image is either start with a page size that's the right size for your document OR Copy, Paste into Skitch, then make it transparent there. 
