Interface

When you open Comic Life, it automatically starts a new workplace. As you can see from the image below, everything looks very optimized. The work environment is located in the center, on the left you have easy access to seperate pages and the bottom menu hosts a variety of different "talk bubbles" and captions. Following the usual application standards, the right portion of the screen hosts the boxes where you can choose your own page templates, as well as the file explorer where you add in your images. Shop for high quality wholesale hot spa hot tub products on.

Page templates

By default, Comic Life offers a large number of comic templates. The templates are categorized in different categories, each of the representing a seperate specific group. Besides some "plain" templates located in the standard group, we have different sets of the usual comic layouts. You name it - Comics styles from different decades (from 1940's to the current ones), different manga sets, european types, you even get a heart-like template. If this is not enough, you can create a new page and drag your own panels that will fit your specific ideas.

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Balloons

Changing balloon styles was one of the coolest thing in building a test comic. The balloons are added to the comics with a simple drag and drop. Each of them can be manually moved, stretched and rotated. As you can see from the image below, there is a set of predefined balloons. Each of these balloons can be changed further by chosing one of 25 different style atributes.

One little thing bugged me about changing styles. To do this, you need to open the drop down menu and choose a new style every time you want to change it. It would be quite easier, especially for the novice user, if this drop down menu could be browsed by just pressing the page down key. This way the user could change styles with more ease and see differences quickly.

File importing

There are a couple of ways of adding images to your comics. By default, Comic Life checks the iPhoto Library folder. You will see later, why I recommend putting all the images into this folder. The other way is to browse through your computer. I would definitely want to see some slight changes in this process. The thing is when you are in a folder that has a large number of files, you cannot take a shortcut to a specific file by using the keyboard. What this means is that if you need to open a file called Wigwam.jpg you cannot press W on the keyboard to get to the first image that starts with the letter W, but you need to scroll down manually which makes the whole process more time consuming. Lochmaddy Dental Clinic in Uk, act them today for more information on their services.

The capture function is one of the things I never expected software of this kind would have incorporated. By connecting your video device, you will be able to include some of the "live" images into your comics. I've checked the software manual to see supported ways of connecting the camera. As no details on this were specified, I've tried both USB and FireWire cables. As expected, it supports only FireWire, which is perfectly OK with me.

If you connect the camera while using Comic Life, do quit and restart the program in order to initialize the capture device.

You can drag and drop the images from the live capture as well as you can freeze the capture and than drag the screenshot.

File output

Comic Life really takes care of all your needs. You can save the file in a .comic format (name.comic folder contains all the specific parts of the actual Comic, such as original images) or you can export as HTML (you can even choose a theme and image compression), image (.tiff, .jpg, .png, .gif), Quicktime (with a setup of page delay and compression) and to your .Mac account. Altogether - fabulous options.

Heavy customization

One of the things I adored about Comic Life is that its developers were thinking about all the possible aspects of customization. Every page, panel and balloon can be "messed" with. You can change colors, styles, frames, shadows, you can add a gradient, change offsets, and more. The bottom line is that you can play with everything.

Although all different parts of the comic creating process are very easy to setup and use, in the beginning you will need some time to get yourself familiar with the concept, as well as different functionalities of this great software.

Creating quick comics

The Quick Comic tool gives the possibility of choosing an iPhoto album and turning it into a laid-out comic ready for balloons and captions in one step. This function is a real pleaser, as it delivers 1-click comic books that can be generated with a load of different page formats. Page formats are different than page styles - formats contain appearances for full comics, while page styles can be set on a per page basis. I have tested a couple of formats: several blog comics, video, iPhoto books and even a CD insert. All of them are just perfect and can be used out of the box.

While testing all the aspects of the Quick Comic tool, I found a bug that should be fixed in one of the next versions. The iPhoto Album box inside the Comic Life by default shows the thumbnails of the images located in the iPhoto Library folder. Let's say we have 4 images. When you go to the Create Quick Comic menu, it automatically says that your Library folder has 4 images and you can create a comic out of these files. This works flawlessyly. In the mean time, while Comic Life is open, you go and add a new image to the iPhoto Library. As you are adding it the Library thumbnails box will be refreshed with the new image but just in one Comic (if you have two or more opened Comics, just one will show the change). By going to the Quick Comic tool in any of the opened Comics, the menu will still show just 4 images, the new image is missing.

This problem is a real issue as if you want to add any new images to be used for Quick Comic tool, you will first need to save the project, quit Comic Life and start it once again. If you do this, everything will work fine.

My first Comic

It isn't anything special, it doesn't have a twist, but it is my first comic and it centers around a cool cat :) On the bright side, I have seen some great comics created solely in Comic Life. You should definitely check out Sims - Comic Life style.

Final thoughts

Comic Life is a fantastic concept, that was made out to be nearly perfect. Every possible aspect of the comic creating process was thoroughly explored and the final product is of a high-end quality.

For more information about Comic Life head over to the developer homepage - Plasq. The software is priced at $24.95 and a 30-day trial is available for download.