We've all sat there through photo album after photo album, whether it's online or in print, and quite frankly, we're all a bit bored by now. Snap after snap of static images of your son's third birthday party? Yawn. Graduation photos of crowds then posed pics with diploma in hand next to mom? We'll pass. But if you could give your photo albums some pizazz, you might just catch our attention. The comic book version of your life? Now we're talking.
>> iPhone/iPod touch or iPad
>> Digital photos
>> Strip Designer ($2.99/universal)
Level: Easy
Comics are a graphic medium, so like Peter Parker you're going to need to bust out your camera. Any of the multitude of photo apps can help you here, whether it be the default camera or Instagram or Camera+ with their multiple filters. Strip Designer, the comic book making app we use later, has tons of built in image manipulation, so you don't need to get fancy at this early stage unless you foresee needing tilt-shifting. You can even use regular digital pictures you took with a real camera.
We took all our snaps on our iPhone, plugged it into our Mac, fired up iPhoto, and created an album just for this project. Then we plugged in our iPad, synced this new album, and were good to go. The same applies for your digital camera. If you're rocking an iPad 2 then you have a built-in camera which certainly makes things easy. Have Dropbox? Upload your pictures there and access the ones you want through their iPad app. There are million ways to do this and all roads lead to Rome.
This app is where the magic happens. Jam-packed full of features, Strip Designer turns any old collection of photos into dynamic, action-packed epics. It's a universal app, so if you don't mind working on the smaller screen of your iPhone or iPod touch, then you could even skip the first two steps and dive right in. We prefer the iPad's bigger screen to really see what we're getting into. For those of you who grew up doing this on paper, Strip Designer takes all the work out of the process so you can concentrate on the fun.
When you first get started, you're presented with seven categories of page designs featuring a total of well over 150 different page layouts, each of which can be modified by you after the fact. You can add more panels and delete panels for an infinite variety. Build one page, then tap the Page button and build as many more as you want in as many varieties of layout as you like. When you tap on a panel, a small lock appears in the corner. Tap that to unlock the panel and you can change its size, move it around the page, or rotate it.
Once you’ve chosen a layout, up pops a screen with your ready-to-be-filled panels. Tap one of these and you’re presented with your image source options. If you’re working on the iPhone or iPad 2 you can use your camera to take pictures from within the app to make comics on the fly. You can also paste from the clipboard or add from a photo album. Link to your Facebook account and all your online photo albums are available too. You can even use Google Maps to zoom for shots of anywhere on the globe. Tap and hold your photo to reposition, resize, and tilt. Tools at the bottom let you alter your pictures’ color, brightness, contrast, and there's even a Comic button that automatically colorizes in graphic novel style. Each effect has a slider to give you fine-grained control. And if you need to paint a moustache on your dastardly villain, tap the paintbrush icon and get to work with customizable colors and brush sizes.
What good's a comic book without effects? Tap the Add button for a full range of dialogue balloons, sound effect stickers, warped text effects, and more picture cells to add for box-within-box images. After you place your effect, you can tap on it to move it around or resize it or stretch it out. Don't like an effect? Tap it, then tap the X in its corner to delete. Oops, you didn’t mean to do that? Tap the undo arrow and you’re golden. Plus, this is one time you won’t mind MarkerFelt as your default font where it looks completely natural in the dialogue balloons, though Strip Designer comes with 81 available fonts. After that, you can bold, italicize, and change the size and color to your heart’s content.
Now it’s time to share your creation with the world. Tap the Share button and you can save your comics directly to your photo album, print them, save them to your Flickr account, upload them to that Facebook account you linked to, and more. Save your comic book as a PDF and you can read it in iBooks or any other PDF capable ebook reader or email it to anyone and everyone.
To go the full comic book route, save your multiple pages as high quality PNG files, then email them to yourself. Download all your page images to a folder on your computer, ZIP that folder, then change the extension from .zip to .cbz (.cbr if you use RAR for compression). Now you've got your very own digital comic. Read it on your computer with Comical or you can upload it to a comic book reader app like ComicZeal and now you're cooking.
