ANyone know of the program Comic Book Creator. I was thinking of buyin g it but am kind of tight on cash as im getting married in a few days and have another baby on the way.

Anyone know if there is a free way to creat the same kind of things that this program does?

Or is it really worth just saving up to buy it?

haven't used it, but congrats on the marriage! when is the blessed event?

I have it and it is very good at what it does and IMHO is reasonably cheap to buy to!

You can make your own panels in Photoshop or similar but it is time consuming,  CBC is much simpler and easy to use with a drag and drop interface.

Congrats on the wedding and I can sympathise on the money side, this 3D hobby is a BIG drain on funds!!  [lol]

I have Comic Book Creator, and I need to say it's cool over all because the amount of time I don't spend now in composing panels and text balloons. The software isn't perfect and I thing it needs some improvements, over all in final type files (if it would save the works in layered photoshop files I would sing and jump...)

But my old system (taking in mind I have PS7 and no other software like Illustrator) was:

-rendering scenes taking in mind how I need the different panels in a previous paper sketch

-resizing them to adjust in a previous page template

-when it was finished, drawing balloons over the panels layer

-next writting text parts over each balloon...

Each page had over 30-40 photoshop layers. A single wrong movement and I needed to repeat a lot of steps

Not that's the past. I take a page template (or create one in CBC with the panels I need), I create the balloons with the text in them, I render ever in the same size (1200 x 900) and resize de drawings directly inside each panel, moving my ballons, etc

You can try it, they have a  downloadable test version that is the same than the registered software (the difference is that you can work with it, but you can only save your work in the registered one)

These are two examples of my comic SHADOWS (pages 2 & 26 - published by Renderotica Magazine). I could do the same in photoshop but spending more time. All the panels rendered at the same size but resized IN the page, etc...

**warning - nudity **

http://www.rafacasette.com/forums/Casette_Shadows.jpg

www.rafacasette.com/forums/Shadows_by_Casette_page26.jpg

Actually I find Photoshop so efficient I can't imagine using anything else. For me a page will have these layers:

One background
One layer per panel (usually not more than four per page)
One hidden layer that I use as an aid when composing dialog
One layer for all balloons
One layer for all text boxes
One layer for each text (number depends on page)

That's typically less than 20 per page, depending on the density of dialog.

Trying to write text over balloons is the wrong way to do it. I write the text first, then draw a path round it, and fill the path on the balloon layer. That way the balloon always fits the text perfectly with no wasted space. One can get very neat results with very little effort.

Also I always render to the size of the panel, so I never need to resize.