Photoshop or Manga Studio (Clip Paint)???

[the white drew carey]

Hello guys, I have a quick question! Clip Paint Studio EX (formerly Manga Studio) is on sale for cheap now, and I am torn whether or not to get it for my digital art / comic needs. So I was looking for advice.

For Photoshop CS6 I have a bunch of the Kyle Webster brush packs which help a lot, and I don't do digital inking, only coloring, ziptones/halftones, and text. I was curious if the extra features and streamlining in CSP EX are worth the cost and effort of learning a new program? I'm particularly curious about the halftone tools are better, and if features like speedlines and other such things are available and easy to use?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Negotiator]

hmm, as soon someone who uses both, i think manga studio is more equipped for the purpose of manga/comics as well as a more fluid, natural feel and control with a tablet. Tools for tone shading, 3d models you can rotate around and use for reference / trace even, cities, towns, chairs etc, cuz why waste all your time trying to get a chair's perspective right when it's not the focus of the panel. i end up using ps for touch ups, filtering, etc. If you're familiar with PS, watch a few manga studio tutorials and see how they're using it, maybe it's something you could be more comfortable with. Its not hard to learn it if you are familiar with PS.

[the white drew carey]

Thx!

Do you have any artwork / samples you'd like to share?

[Negotiator]

msg sent

[Frogze]

By all means get CSP EX it's the best comics oriented drawing program available right now. They even added animation capabilities in version 1.5.4 recently. The latest PS versions had that too but it's nowhere as intuitive as CSP's. Also the rulers in CSP are a very powerful tool

[Negotiator]

Ooh. Sounds cool. I'll upgrade to that next

[the white drew carey]

Curious if there are a lot of add-ons for CSP EX? I tried the demo and the extras like halftones, speed/motion lines, word balloons seem to be quite sparse, and I see that Smith Micro also advertizes a bunch of add-on packs for sale when you look at EX. I don't want to buy a stripped down product and then have to pay more for these extras just to make it viable. Especially since I've spent good money on many of Kyle Webster's excellent brush packs for PS.

Edited September 14, 2016 by the white drew carey

[Frogze]

I don't know about the add-ons, personally I think it's pretty complete on its own, it does everything one might need to do comics or manga. EX version also has support for 3 models import which can be rendered in various ways. You can see a lot of that in modern mangas including macross the first if I'm not mistaken, it's a great time saver and gives very impressive results (but imo it lacks the oldschool charm of more organic hand drawn mechas).

Anyway to each their own I guess but every CSP adopter I know has never gone back to PS except for painting/coloring maybe which is arguably superior in PS : it has more filters, add-ons, extremely deep brush configuration and some odd stuff you'd see only if you use specific hardware like Wacom's artpen stylus (vertical axis rotation).

If you're not drawing comics digitally then CSP EX may not be the tool for you, otherwise it's a no brainer.

Edited September 14, 2016 by Frogze