Comic Life 3 and Daz3d - Is there a Thread

David R

Do you mean you are exporting to images and you chose PNG format?

vrba79

It has been so long since I've used Comic Life, that I honestly couldn't tell you. With a little practice you can do a lot of the stuff it does in Photoshop or Gimp.

Richard Haseltine

Replies merged into this thread since the question was posted in two paces.

DaremoK3

@stjames.artworks :

I believe you are trying to achieve something that doesn't appear to be available in CL3.

I use pre-alpha-ed PNG files for inline compositing in CL3, so I have never used the Instant Alpha feature, but it appears to work just as any other 2D software for removing backgrounds.

However, and I believe this is where you are finding your technique erroneous, it does not have the function to remove the overall background (the page [generally white]) as other 2D software which is required to create the alpha transparency in the PNG file, nor does it give any commands at export to allow for this.

I just checked all my CL3 PNG exports that contained single alpha-ed images, and they all exported with the default background (the page they are on).

I suggest you do what others do, and use other software for deleting your unwanted rendered backgrounds before using CL3.

TheLion

DaremoK3 said:

@stjames.artworks :

I believe you are trying to achieve something that doesn't appear to be available in CL3.

I use pre-alpha-ed PNG files for inline compositing in CL3, so I have never used the Instant Alpha feature, but it appears to work just as any other 2D software for removing backgrounds.

However, and I believe this is where you are finding your technique erroneous, it does not have the function to remove the overall background (the page [generally white]) as other 2D software which is required to create the alpha transparency in the PNG file, nor does it give any commands at export to allow for this.

I just checked all my CL3 PNG exports that contained single alpha-ed images, and they all exported with the default background (the page they are on).

I suggest you do what others do, and use other software for deleting your unwanted rendered backgrounds before using CL3.

If I understand your comment correctly, you're saying you cannot make the page itself fully transparent in CL3. Although it's not quite obvious (as almost nothing with this program seems to be), this is actually possible.

To make the page transparent, what you need to do is the following:

1. Select the page
2. Click on "Fill" which opens up the color-picker dialog
3. Click on "Show Colors", this will change the color dialog into a more advanced version.
4. Here you can set the opacity to 0% and apply the color to the page.

Although it will still show the page as white inside the program, it will now show the fill-color as dark-grey. When you export the page as a PNG, it will be fully transparent and if you for example add speech bubbles to it, the background will be transparent but the speech bubbles will be visible.

I experimented with this after reading that the image quality would drop if you exported your comic, so I wanted to see if I could simply export the speech bubbles on a transparent background so I could then combine it with the original image again in Photoshop afterward (of course that would only be convenient for full-paged image comics).

I've also used this in combination with transparent PNG images by the way, and their transparent areas also render as transparent when the page is set to have an opacity of 0%.

Hope it helps.

DaremoK3

@TheLion :

Well, I stand corrected.  Thank you.

This might open up new possibilities for me to export full page work for further work in Manga Studio for full production outputs.

There you go, @stjames.artworks  --  Just follow TheLion's directions above for alpha-ed PNG exports from CL3...

marcos-andrevieira

Hello

Did you guys tried to change the sharpness of the image in the image pane of the inspector ?

Is it possible to predefine it to 50 %?

marcos-andrevieira

Have been playing with comic life 3 a litle bit and encontered the same thing as you, images are blurry. One thing that helps a lot is double click the image go to the inspector and select the image pane, then increase the sharpness to 50% as the standard is 0 (don't understand why it comes with 0 predefined.)

TheLion

Hey @marcos-andrevieiraa,

Apologies for the long delay in responding. I don't check these forums often and I don't think I get notification e-mails from the forum either, so I should see if I can set that up.

marcos-andrevieira said:

Hello

Did you guys tried to change the sharpness of the image in the image pane of the inspector ?

Is it possible to predefine it to 50 %?

I haven't played with that setting yet. Don't think you can set it as a default, but I do think it saves the settings when you save your comic to file. So, what you could try is to either make an empty file with all the settings you need so you can just use that as starting point, or you could try to save it as a template and see if it remembers the settings then (File -> Save As Template).

marcos-andrevieira said:

Have been playing with comic life 3 a litle bit and encontered the same thing as you, images are blurry. One thing that helps a lot is double click the image go to the inspector and select the image pane, then increase the sharpness to 50% as the standard is 0 (don't understand why it comes with 0 predefined.)

I had this blurry-image issue when I first started to use the program, but then found a tip online that this was caused by the "Image Filter Resolution". By default it's set to 150 dpi, but if you change it to 300 dpi this appears to solve the issue. Once I did that, my images came out sharp and without any added blur when I exported the comic from Comic Life 3. As far as I can tell with the 300 dpi setting a 4k image I render from Daz3D and load into the program and then export again comes out of the final export looking pretty much identitical to the original. You can change it by opening the inspector, then going to the "Document"-tab (looks like a window with 4 panes), and then the option is at the bottom called "Image Filter Resolution", and 300dpi is the maximum.
I do think you have to set this before loading your images, since I assume the images are already changed once they're loaded. But, I've never actually tested that theory and just set it to 300 dpi before I do anything else.

Another thing that might help is to set the correct Page Size. I mostly create full-paged comics where 1 image covers the entire page, and I only create things for digital use, so I don't have to worry about printers etc. So if I add a regular 4k image (3840x2160 pixels) to Comic Life 3, it will start scaling that image to the size of the page, unless the page is the same dimensions as the image. As such I always work with a custom setup page that has a width of 3840 pt and a height of 2160 pt. Of course if you work with panels you'll probably have to figure out what size you want your page to be (or do some calculations for the panels). Exporting those pages using the 72 dpi setting then gives me pages that are exactly 3840x2160 pixels and the images are crisp (if you use a higher dpi setting during the export it will export the images at a higher scaled resolution calculated based on 300 dpi). Important side-note is of course that if you do want to go to print then this technique might not work for you, or you'll either have to use something like Photoshop to get the dpi back up to 300, and scale up the image, or use a smaller page size in Comic Life 3 that is already pre-calculated based on 300 dpi and then use the 300 dpi export. Just for clarification, although this also deals with dpi-values, this has nothing to do with the "Image Filter Resolution".

Hope this helps.