2.2 Documents

Hi, welcome back. In this lesson, I'm gonna show you how to create a new document, how to import an existing document and how to export once you're finished. Hopefully, we're feeling a little bit more confident with the interface of Manga Studio, having explored last lesson. Now, it's time to create a new file and you do that in Manga Studio, just as you would in Photoshop by clicking file and new, or you can click on this new icon at the top here. Once you do that, you're presented with this window here. They're a lot of different settings to change so I'll go through each one, because it looks a little bit daunting at the moment. So quite self-explanatory, file name, you can change your new file to whatever name you like. We have a few presets to choose from, so we have different international paper sizes and different resolutions. And, we can also change the unit we're working in, so I work in millimeters, but you can choose anything that you'd be more comfortable with. Down at the bottom here we have two different sides, so on the left-hand side we have our canvas, and on the right-hand side we have our printing options. So, if you're working on just an illustration and you want a plain canvas, you can uncheck Manga draft settings, and that leaves you with these very basic settings to change here, so you can enter the width of your document and the height, and you can see a small preview of what you're creating there. You can also choose different international paper sizes. This button on the left here changes these two values, so if you see when I click it, it changes to a landscape because it's changed the width around with the height. We can change the resolution and we can change the basic expression color, now basic expression color is the color space that we'll be working in. So if we want a full color illustration, which is color, we want a grey scale image, which is gray, we want black and white, which is monochrome. Lastly, we can change the paper color, so, when this is ticked, we click on this window here, and we're presented with this hue wheel to change our paper color. If you're making a comic, you may want to turn on Manga draft settings and this brings up settings for the printer. So we have our canvas size here, but we also want to set the size of our page, so the binding finish size is the final size you want your actual physical page to be once printed. And we can set that width and height there or we can choose different international page size. We also have a bleed width, now, invariably, when you print something the page has to be cut and there's always a margin of error when cutting a page. So we always put in a little margin of error. So we draw all the way to the edge of the bleed, that way, when the printer cuts the page, we aren't left with any bits of paper exposed without artwork on them. We also have our default border or inner size. Now you can see in our preview that we have a small rectangle on the very inside of our page there and that's the live area of our page, that's where everything important in our comic has to go. So all of our panels and dialogue will go in this box and, we can change the width and height of that box, and we can also offset that box so it's at a different position on the page. Now, I'm gonna click okay and I'm gonna show you how to import an existing file. So, if we click on file, and import, we can scan from our scanner or we can import an image. And I'll click on this texter image here and press open, and you'll see that our image is opened and we can manipulate that. So if we click on one of these edges here and drag, we can scale that up and we have a blue handle here that we can rotate. So if I undo that, and I'll show you a different way you can import this image. So if I want to create a tiled version of that, I can click file import pattern from image and choose the exact same image again, and press open. But now you can see that just like on the background of a webpage, for example, it's tiled our image and as we change this one, it changes every other tile on there and we can also rotate all of those. We have a few more options for those if we go to our tool properties. So if we scroll to the bottom here, you can see different types of tiling. So if I click on these little buttons, you can see the different effects. You can change the rotation numerically rather than manually and you can change the scale in the same way. Once we are done, we have a couple of different way of creating a file. So firstly, we could save as and we can choose the native Clip Studio or Manga Studio format, any popular image format, and Photoshop document. We can also choose to export a single layered document, so we choose our format, and it compresses all of our layers into one flat image, or choose a layered format and we can choose Eclipse Studio Paint or Photoshop format. I'll choose Photoshop and click save and you can see all of our different options of what to actually export. So we can choose to include our crop marks that we've created if we need to. We can choose to include our default border and Manga Studio creates a different type of layer called a draft layer. So you draw all of your rough drawings in this draft layer and by default when you export, it deletes all of those layers so that you don't have to go through deleting them before you present the file to your client. So, if you want to include those, you can turn those on, but, by default, they're turned off. And those are just a couple of ways that you can create and modify files in Manga Studio. In the next lesson, we'll be going through all the different tools and offer.