Toonzone participated in a demo of Manga Studio EX 5 at the San Diego Comic-Con 2013. Manga Studio has become the go-to software for many comic artists and illustrators. It can be used as part of a completely digital comic creation process or to streamline your more traditional comic creation workflow. More recent versions have focused on increasing the feature set of the coloring tools available and, in many cases, eliminated the need to import your work into other software.
Manga Studio EX 5 builds on the previous entries in the Manga Studio series with a number of additional tools related to story creation and general usage improvements. EX 5 carries over and enhances features found in Manga Studio EX 4, including the ability to work on multiple canvases. Users are now able to combine pages to create multi-page spreads. The size of individual pages may also be made different than the rest of the document.
When creating a new file, artists will be able to select a left or right binding for manga or traditional style comics. Real-time previews will be available, allowing users to see their visual story flow. A story drop down menu allows for detailed organizational information and notes to be entered at the title and individual page level.
There’s now an option to batch export pages. EX 5 is backwards compatible with Manga Studio EX 4 files. Individual and story files from EX 4 can be imported into Manga Studio EX 5.
The text tools have also been enhanced. Users can now italicize and bold words. They’ll also be able to adjust word and line spacing. Fonts can be set for specific purposes such as sound, dialog balloons and thought bubbles.
Previous versions of Manga Studio exhibited some lag on the Mac OS. This has been corrected in Manga Studio EX 5. Symmetry Rulers and 2D and 3D Line and Tones (2DLT and 3DLT) will be made available in September or October as a free downloadable update to owners of Manga Studio EX 5.
Manga Studio 5 and EX 5 Video Tour
As with previous versions of Manga Studio, Smith Micro has a dedicated tutorials section available for users of the software. For more information on Manga Studio EX 5, be sure to check out Smith Micro’s website.
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