Comic Life

 

interface of Comic Life 1.5

For those of you out there who have always wanted to make your own comic book, Comic Life by Plasq is a fun, easy way to make nice looking comics in no time. You can certainly spend the time to set up templates in various programs like CorelDraw (retail CorelDraw Suite cost: $429) or Illustrator (retail cost $599) to pull this off, but (taking it from personal experience) the time involved to set up something like that usually leaves one bored with the whole process. Comic Life takes the grunt work out of creating page after page of comics by using their easy drag and drop interface to structure pages, add your own images, create sidebar text or text balloons, then save the whole project for print or email. The preloaded style boxes and font options are customizable, or you can rely on the pre-made shapes, colors and fonts provided. I was amazed at how fast you can stick something together and at a price of $29.95 ($24.95) Standard Edition) you won't be wasting your money. If you want to try it before you buy it, visit their website and download a 30 day trial version. This is so low-end to use, I would suggest it for almost any age user.

Silver Efex Pro; True Power for Black and White

 

The problem a lot of projects have when trying to use black and white images is the lack of control over the contrast within an image. Most of the standard settings to desaturate an image in popular photo editing programs, like Photoshop, give you very little control over your contrast without having to venture into the channel settings, creating a lot of feathered masks and taking more time than you had anticipated.  Nik Software has come up with an ingenius little plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture called Silver Efex. This, like all plugins from Nik, offers a variety of presets to change a color image into a dramatic black and white composition, or, allows you to create your own customized settings. You can set control points within an image, adjust the radius of the area affected, work directly on color channels and have the output placed on its own layer so as not to disrupt the original image. This plugin is not so much a time saver (although it does work fast, if all you want to do is change a pic from color to black and white, the standard filters can do that just as quick) but more for fine adjustments to photography. I have taken images and greatly enhanced specific areas within the image while leaving the secondary subject matter untouched. You can download a demo of this great plugin at their website.