![]() ![]() But before they could post their first entries, Robert Grant, a British-born computer programmer living in the United States, asked the pair to design an interface for a program inspired by his sisters' teen magazines, which add speech balloons and captions to regular photos to tell love stories. ![]() This "roller-coaster", as Pearson describes it, began when he and Lang decided to set up a blog at about their shared passion for creating user-friendly software. The internet is also the means by which, in just two-and-a-half years, Pearson has gone from receiving unemployment benefits to getting regular cheques (he won't say for how much) from Apple Computer. Not that local anonymity bothers the softly spoken Pearson, now chief executive of what he describes as a "virtual" company. This is also true of Melbourne, where two of Plasq's co-founders, Cris Pearson and Keith Lang, and one of its six other staff, Mathieu Tozer, are based. Yet, despite the ubiquity of its creation (about 10 million copies), Plasq, the company behind Comic Life, is little known outside geekier Mac circles. Since early 2006, this fun and easy-to-use software program has been included with every new Apple Macintosh computer. If, however, you just like to quickly toss together a few pictures and add some jokes to get a laugh, you’ll probably be happy sticking with your older version of Comic Life.CRIS PEARSON, KEITH LANG AND ROBERT GRANT, FOUNDERS, PLASQĬomic Life, as its name suggests, allows the user to turn life - at least, as represented by a digital camera - into comic strips. For comic creators with longer, more-elaborate stories to tell, you’ll appreciate the new tools in Comic Life 3, as they can actually enhance your story. Those users will appreciate the app’s ability to export comics as PDFs, images, ePub, or CBZ files. Other new features include 3D effects for lettering, the capability to display two pages side by side, guidelines, find and replace across captions and speech balloon, and the capability to create a master page for repeating elements.Ĭomic Life 3 takes a few more steps towards being a complete tool for serious or professional comic creators. The feature seems mundane, but using the right ballon can help convey emphasis on the text it contains, and adjusting the ballon itself lets you make sure it’s not in the way of your image. Click a control point, and you can resize the balloon, adjust its tail, and tweak its position. When you click a balloon, a box with control points appears around it-Photoshop users who’ve performed a Free Transform function will recognize this control, and in Comic Life, it works in a similar way. There’s now a larger variety of balloons, and you get greater control over them. The enhanced speech balloons are my favorite new feature, as unglamorous as they might seem. The Instant Alpha tool can be used to quickly remove a background, though busy backgrounds require more effort. Comic Life also has new settings for adjusting strokes, fills, and opacity and new parametric filters to give your images a more artistic look. It works well with monochrome backgrounds, or background where the colors are solids (not gradients), but on photos with busy backgrounds, the tool isn’t so instant-you must do more work to get rid of that background without affecting the primary subject of the image. For example, the new Instant Alpha tool promises to erase the background of an image. There are also, however, improvements that will appeal to all Comic Life users, especially in the app’s image-editing tools. You can then drag and drop the icons into your comic and easily adjust the formatting to your liking. When the Script Editor recognizes a keyword (Comic Life has a set of default keywords, but you can also add your own), it creates an icon specific to that keyword that appears in an icon column on the left side of your script. For example, If you type a person’s name, Comic Life recognizes that you want to format the text as speech and will put it in a speech bubble. The Script Editor uses keywords to automatically format the text in the proper way. But if you want to tell more detailed, complicated stories, Comic Life now has a Script Editor to help you form your comic’s storyline. ![]() It’s likely that most folks use Comic Life to throw a few pictures together to create simple, humorous anecdotes, and the app works well for that. Comic Life 3 now supports two-up page viewing. Version 3, Comic Life offers more features geared toward people who have a serious interest in storytelling using the comic book medium. For over eight years, Plasq’s Comic Life has provided an easy way to present your photos and other images in comic book form.
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