Alex Heizer

Lately I’ve been trying out Manga Studio Debut 4. I’d seen it when I was looking at other software they had available but I was happy with Photoshop at the time. I do all of my drawing with a pencil, so I didn’t feel that Manga Studio would be worth it. But after trying it (they have a 30-day free trial offer), I switched! Not from pencils but from Photoshop.

Manga Studio’s drawing tools are way more advanced than Photoshop’s, which seems logical given PS’ focus on photo editing (pardon the pun!) The word I would use to describe them is the first word I used when I tried them — “Woah!” But the thing I saw over and over again when Googling MS tutorials was “Done in Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop” (or Pixelmator, on Macs). I thought, “Why not just color it in Manga Studio,too? I mean, it does have coloring capabilities, right?” Well, of course. But sometimes it’s not obvious.

The Pen, Marker and Brush tools all let you color, but there was one big thing which Photoshop has that Manga Studio doesn’t (at least, so I thought!) It’s incredibly simple to drop a brush’s opacity to allow you to layer colors or build up color as you would with a real marker or watercolors.
MS’ standard tools only allow you to paint with solid colors. There’s an opacity setting on both the tool options and the color selector, but all either of these do is lighten the brush’s color, which you still paint with at 100% opacity.
This explains why so many people ink in MS but color in PS.

Not to be daunted, I discovered a way to get the brush behavior I’m used to which isn’t described in any manual or tutorial I’d seen.

Here’s a simple way to replace Photoshop with Manga Studio in your coloring workflow:

1. Instead of Pen, Marker or Brush, choose Pattern Brush.

2. Choose the brush shape “Circle”, which is in the “Definite Shape” dropdown.

3. On the General tab of the main Tool Options,

• set the Opacity value to something less than 100%. To begin with, set it to 50% and find your own favorite value as you play with it.
• set the Hardness value to 1%, which will give you a soft brush.
• set the Interval value to less than 10%. This will cause the brush to place each pattern item close enough to create a solid stroke instead of the regular open (random) pattern. How low you set the Interval depends on your Size and Hardness values. Setting the Interval too low will cause a really bad speed degradation. Setting it too high will cause unevenness in the quality of your strokes.
• For a large Size and low Hardness combination, set Interval around 10-12%.
• For a smaller Size and higher Hardness combination, set Interval to about 5-7%.

4. Choose your color and set the opacity in the color selector to 100%.

Now when you paint you’ll get true transparency, even over existing colors, and you can build up and mix colors gradually as you would with real markers, watercolors or Photoshop.

Tip: By increasing the brush Size and decreasing the Opacity values you can get an even softer blending of colors!

I hope this helps both new and advanced users to explore and utilize Manga Studio’s powerful coloring capabilities!