2.1 Interface

Hi, welcome back. In this chapter we'll be familiarizing ourselves with the very basics of Manga Studio. And in this lesson, I'll guide you through the interface. So I've opened up Manga Studio for the very first time here, and as you can see we've got all sorts of different windows. And it can seem a little bit daunting to begin with especially if you're used to something a bit more streamlined like Photoshop. I'll guide you through each and every one of these windows. I'll show you what it does, and I'll also show you how to customize that so that you don't have all this clutter when you're trying to work. The first thing, I will show you is the menu bar at the top. Now, I won't go into too much detail because a lot of these are very similar to Photoshop. So if you've used Photoshop before you'll know what to expect with the menu bar here. But I'll just guide you through very quickly. So if I click on Clip Studio at the top, you'll see we can change our Preferences, our Shortcut keys, and our Modify keys. We can also organize our libraries and we can check our license or change our license. Under File, we can create documents, Open documents, Save them, Export, Import and Print. Under Edit, we can change our canvas. So we can Crop, Rotate, Change the Colors and Transform anything that's on our canvas there. Under Layers we can create Layers, Delete Layers, Duplicate Layers and add layer modifiers here like Rulers and Masks. Under Selection we can modify anything we've selected with the marquis tool. So we can Expand, Shrink or Blur. We can also Select or Deselect, Reselect or Invert our selected area. On the View, we can Rotate our canvas. Now, this isn't changing our actual document, we're just rotating the view so that it can be a little bit easier to draw. We can Zoom in, we can Fit to screen, we can also enable certain things to be visible. So we can turn on a Grid or a Ruler. We can also change the Grid Settings or change our Crop marks. Once you've turned on a Grid or a Ruler, we can also set Snap. So whenever we draw we can Snap to a Ruler or we can Snap to a Grid. Under Filter we have all the usual filters like Blur, Sharpen and Transform. And under Window, we can modify our Workspace in windows here. So all of the Windows that I have open have a tick mark there. And lastly under Help, we can go to the website or we can read the Manual. So the next area, I'd like to show you is all of our tools. So these are arranged in small sections here. At the very top, we have our modifying tools. So we can zoom, we can rotate and move. We can manipulate an object. We can move a layer. We can lasso here. This is our magic wand selection. And this is our eye dropper. In the next section, we have all of our drawing tools. So we've got a pen, a pencil, a paintbrush, an air brush, an eraser and a blender. Lastly, we have our miscellaneous tools. We've got our fill bucket, gradient, all of our rulers, test and vector tools. So I'd like to show you these two windows here. So these two are contact sensitive, so if you see I've selected the zoom tool here. So every time I select a different tool, you can see that they change with all these different settings. So I'll go back to the zoom tool, and this is our sub tool window. So the sub tools for the zoom tool are zoom in and zoom out. So if I click on the Pencil here, you'll see we can then choose different types of pencils. So those are our sub tools for our Pencil or we can choose a Pastel. And the same goes for the pen, there are a whole lot of different types of pen. So if I go back to the Pencil and I'll show you the Tool property window. Now, this changes the properties of something we've selected in the sub tool palate. So if I choose the dark pencil you can see the settings for the dark pencil are like this. So I can change the Brush Size, the hardness, the density, and this applies to every single tool that we have here. Down here we have different ways of selecting different colors. So I've got a color wheel and we've got some sliders, a library here, our different brush sizes, and we can also choose very specific shades of different colors there. Here we have a library. Now, this library's full of all sorts of bits and pieces. We've got sort of 3D elements here. We also have page presets, some special effects, some objects, some backgrounds, all different things that you'd need to create illustration or a comic. We have the Navigator, just like in Photoshop. We have subview, and if you click on Import there you can actually import a reference image, and that will always show in this small window here. And we have our system information. We have the Layer Property window which shows the properties of a layer. And we also have our Layers window there. So whenever we create a document, all of the layers will be visible here. We also have History, just like in Photoshop. And Actions. So if we want to for example, create a draft layer, you just click on this Play button here. And that will create a new draft layer. So it's just like Actions in Photoshop. So for me, this is a little bit cluttered now. We've got all of these different windows and I'm gonna show you how to customize them so that we don't have quite so much clutter and we only have the tools that we use the most often showing. So the first thing, I'm gonna get rid of is this library of objects here. So all you have to do is drag each tab out and click on the cross. And I'll do that for everything in our library here. And that's freed up all of this space here. I also don't use the Navigator, so I'll pull that out or sub view or information. Layout properties, you can always change your layer properties by right-clicking on a layer. So I don't tend to use this either, I'll get rid of that. And search layer where we can search the name of a layer. I don't intend to have that many layers, so I'll get rid of that. Now, I'll drag out layers and keep that. I'll drag out History, get rid of that. And the actions get rid of those. And I'll just put layers back there. So tool properties, I always like to have this showing. So I'll drag that and move that to about there. And sub-tools, you always need to be able to choose your different sub-tools once you've selected a different tool. I'll move that just down there. Now, this has gone really quite large so drag that out. I like to keep the color wheel and the color slider so I can tweak each color that I've selected on the color wheel and then just get rid of everything else. And then just drag these into position at the bottom. Like that. One last thing to mention. Unlike Photoshop, you can actually change the order of your tools here. So if I choose the Pencil tool, you can see. I can also drag that to a different position. Hopefully, this is looking a little less cluttered now, and you're a lot more confident to start working in Manga Studio. In the next lesson, I'm gonna show you how to work with documents.