Transcript:
So you want, you’re coming to look a little bit more manga like, and you got Photoshop or something similar. Well, please watch this video throughout the whole thing. I know it’s kind of long. It’s 20 minutes, but that means I’m trying to make sure I give you all the tools to get started. Okay, welcome back. This is Citria. Cet riy a and I’m coming back to you. Guys with a toning tutorial. A couple of requests have been made through my 100 days of making comics, so here’s one of them, and that is how I get that screen tone Manga tone like effect for my comics, so I’ll be using Photoshop and using my main character from my Webcomic Cross star and I’m going to do two versions of it, just so you can get a sense of light versus dark tone style and either one works, whatever goes or whatever you’re a taster style, so definitely go and look up some of your own manga comics that you have in your collection and that you like, and perhaps use it as a style reference. So, yeah, as you can see right here, It’s not just the starting out with dropping in tones but doing the difference between how much ink or how many darkness or dark spots or spot blacks, there’s various words for it that you start with your artwork, so you’re inking, really needs to start kind of giving you the direction of where the lights and darks are for yourself, and if you have more questions about, you know, inking with lights and darks and spotlights and stuff, please leave your comments and your questions below or any other kind of questions for comics so first off. I am just going to go ahead and pick just a bit of color variations or grayscale gradations. And I pick these kind of scale, mostly, so that way, there’s enough difference between each of the shades of contrasts, so as when it’s printed, especially when it’s printed, you can actually see the difference between the colors so pretty much. I tend to do a difference between about 20 percent 20 to 20 to 25% between the colors, and I usually pick or use about three deeds of gray. But sometimes I might use all and your darkest dark does not have to be black other than your inking and your lightest light does not have to be ten percent. It’s all in all in your preference and perhaps in the style of your comics, So if you’re doing something light-hearted, of course, you want to do lighter tones or if you’re doing something moody, dark, maybe, like a horror or like a dark fantasy or something like that. You might want to use darker dark’s so here. I’m just putting in a general percentage and that’s just mostly to hopefully clarify it for you guys. But you know, 100 percent black saturation versus 50 percent versus 10 percent and again. That’s just so you can get the difference. I tend to use the the second to darkest, so kind of like the 75 percent and then I tend to use a 30 percent in a 10 percent. So here I’m gonna go ahead and colorize or shade in some of the colors. I’m just showing to you right here. Real quick that you want to perhaps use your ink. Your line are on top and set it to multiply or use your screen tone or your gray shading layer and set that to multiply. I personally prefer the inks to be set to multiply, so I’m gonna go ahead and start painting out My lovely chibi characters real quick. So the tools that I’m using for shading is basically, you know, a hard round brush just going in and just filling out the shapes sometimes. I use the fill bucket tool. Sometimes I use eraser tool, just whatever you normally do for put in your colors or filling in your colors. It’s pretty much the same, so nothing too. Fancy about that so as you can see. I’m just going as quick as possible, just adding things in and testing things out to see if there’s enough contrast, making some of the shading or drop shadow shades and quite frankly, depending on what kind of style of manga or comic that you’re following, you might not need to add all that extra layers of shading, but that’s just a style preference for me in true manga tone fashion, especially the older you go like the older school or the older style comics may not have of this toning, simply because of the amount of work that it takes to sit there and cut all those pieces and layering all those pieces. But hey, this is digital, and sometimes you need to update on things so yeah. I’m just gonna go in and fill out the different shades of my characters like you can see the darker line art or the line art with the more black, so I went in with a heavier shade of tones, and, of course I go in and use the selection tool and maybe add some gradiation s here and so far as you can tell, there is none of that screen tone dot effect, and that’s for the most part for my comic. It’s just much quicker to go ahead and just do all of, you know the painting and whatnot. So if you really want to make yourself look painterly versus, like just a regular manga, you can so whatever that you’re normally used to for shading your comic or your stilt. Your illustrations is the way to go. I just would advise again not to go too crazy with the blending and shading because you lose that style, that’s flat Manga style. Because again you got to recall that the way they used to do it is they actually would cut up pieces of sticky film to paste on their character. So right, quick, where you’re seeing. This red is just an option that I think Several programs have, but in particular for Photoshop, this is like a quick masking tool. So say, you don’t want to make like a clip or you don’t want to have an actual, permanent masking layer and you just want to do something. Quick, the hotkey for that is Q, but basically it’s a little little square with a circle underneath where the color picker squares are. And that’s basically what that is and you just kind of switch between modes and I think you can pick what kind of color it looks. And you can tell on the highlighter. The layer it’s highlighted in red to just let you know that you’re in a quick masking. Click masking mode instead and what it does is especially for weird kind of like selection areas or in my case. I tend to have broken lines a lot. I tend to use that a lot and then just go in and start adding my shading and my toning. But yes, real quick, guys. I’m just gonna make a quick mention that I would consider myself a little bit. More advanced in a beginner would say an intermediate or like a fan comic or not a fan comic, but a hobby comic artist. So I would like to suggest real quick. Perhaps after you’re done with this video, so go ahead and check out some peoples. Who’s been doing it for a much longer time? You have quite a few people that do a number of Manga style artwork in have kept to the older style of Manga. You have my! Monica live the artists of sacred. You have white manga. You have Doki-doki? Club, which is actually people who are currently living in Japan and there’s a number of other people, so there’s either link on the video or a link in the description. So moving right along. I am skipping to this part where you can actually make any kind of thing into a tone so long as it has a very high contrast, so the original color. I just grabbed a pattern, but the original color of this pattern was in a sort of like blue teal pink. Whatever, but the point is, it had a lot of contrast, and once you turn it into grayscale, you can mess around with its levels and whatnot, and you can see that it’s captured a lot of this textures and stuff like that, so let’s say you had your own original pattern, or you found a cute little pattern somewhere or even if you’re using like digital backgrounds or whatnot, the point of it is that you just need a high enough contrast in the artwork and it to be nicely clean scan or cleanly created. And you can make some really cute little things as your tone, so all those pretty tones that you see in Shoujo manga with like florals and [Music]. Yeah, patterns and a dress, someone not this is basically where you start with it and I’m assuming that’s how they started making tones to begin with. So yeah, if you want to create your own tone, so this is a step so like I said, make sure it’s in black and white. Make sure the levels are well done and nice and tight and you can mess around with it. Keep it in grayscale. Then what you want to do is make sure you go into image mode. Grayscale and any program can be switched into grayscale. Now this part. I’m assuming is particular to Photoshop. I don’t know about other programs. After you switch it to grayscale, you need to go into image mode bitmap. You have to change your image into grayscale before you go into bitmap. And from there, you’ll see a pop up screen where it’ll say input/output you want to keep it to the DPI and the minimum DPI is 300 and then on the method you get several options you can threshold it and you could. You know, do different kind of different kind of patterns. You could diamond it start, which gets really weird, but I always pick half tones, cuz That’s the other or the more English or American or western way of calling screen tones as half tones after that, you’re going to see an option whether it’s sixty line density or fifty something versus forty five. I always keep it at forty five, and I usually give it at 60 degree density or 72 degree density, and that’s basically talking about how dense or how much black per square inch and I come up with those numbers, because if you ever if you have ever bought the leader or hobbling or whatever screen tone company from Japan, they actually tell you what the number of the density of that screen tone so you can recreate it and I’m gonna go ahead and show you real quick. What I mean by just giving you an image of a scan of that screen down so moving and right along ahead after you’ve copied and pasted your image of your custom pattern, You can go ahead and place it into the artwork in here. I’m showing you an actual masking version, so this is not a quick mask. This is the permanent masking, and I like to use masking versus plopping in and erasing it. Because let’s say you have some edges that you miss or say you want to use the tone In multiple places you can go in and just edit the actual, masking part versus the actual image, and you know, you don’t end up losing image quality or image information at that point, so now that we’ve had our lovely, lovely art worked all nicely toned in and stuff, we gots to add back in the highlights, right, The highlights now there are more advanced techniques for highlights, but we’re gonna keep this basic. After all. This is a 101 or beginner’s tutorial for screen, toning in Photoshop. How you highlight is really dependent on your style, so I’m just using a basic round brush and I added a layer on top of the tone layer, but underneath the inking layer, hence why I like the inking Larry to be on top and just kind of call. The or White–and just started painting in the highlights just nice and quickly adding in highlights where you add highlights in like what direction you add, lighting and stuff is definitely a topic for another video. So let me know if that is something you guys would be interested in. I’m talking about highlights or talking about inking versus highlights. Whatever floats your boat and again, This is just a basic round eraser, and I’m just going in and cutting in some highlights now. Moving along to a little bit of a fun part is adding that airbrush kind of quality now. This can be kind of annoying or tricky or just weird, and it all depends on that just how authentic you want to get it to be, but basically, basically, what you want to do is have a soft round brush like a basic soft round brush. Make sure you set it to dissolve in its blending layer and from then on, you can just adjust it as you go with the opacity, adjust it with the flow and perf you know, Perfer ibly what I prefer is to turn off the sizing because that gets to be real, it’s. Once you mess with around the that brush, you’ll get to understand what. I’m trying to expose on the feeling, but what I’m trying to do is get the brush to be in a nice, soft gradation, so messing around with hardness while at the same time, trying to make sure that it actually deposits enough white, so you can see. I’m adjusting the opacity doing all sorts of things where it looks like. It was either airbrush or what the original method of doing this was actually taking like, a hard eraser or a pen eraser or some kind of eraser and erasing off the tone. So this is the effect that I’m attempting to get down and I do tend to use it usually. Doh what end up happening or what I tend to do is during I during the Edit of the gray layer, I just go ahead and blend out the edges, so that way when I change it into a tone where you get the dot tones, You won’t have to deal with that, but I figured this was a good little thing. If ever, you guys want to do it in this method and here. I’m zooming in and you can see that all this Brush is depositing is hard and white pixels, so no blending pixels. You don’t see any other shade of color, Besides that gray and that pixel, and this is a very important part. If you’re trying to get to that look, you definitely want to keep two hard colors, hard shapes not blending things into each other. This is a painting. This is literally just dot great old now. Printing qualities and printing capabilities are definitely capable of printing in that blended grayscale color. But you’d be losing the look of that whole manga style or old-school manga style. So this is the main reason why you have to keep things in a hard tone because you’re trying to kind of mimic the limitations of technology back then back then you can only print in solid, black and white and toning is kind of like a cheat for that, so definitely want to try this out. See if it is in your preference. Hopefully you guys have enjoyed this quick little tutorial of mine and definitely leave comments on below, but before we close out, let me do the final steps that I had shown you while we were working on the custom pattern tones and that is transitioning or changing the grayscale into a dot pattern. And just just before that you can see. I did made a different white layer on top of the ink layer and using that differing or that soft brush, I’m going in and softening some of the line art, so you can come up with a lot of effects and there’s a lot more other effects that I have done over the years, But this video is already going quite long, so let’s go ahead and start transitioning this grayscale into a bit map screen toned style so while. I’m showing you guys some lovely eye candy of me. Just adding some extra bits to this illustration and making it up healing. I just wanted to let you guys know again. That about cross star, and that is a sci-fi fantasy adventure comic, so feel free to take a read and tell me your thoughts about it. I’d really appreciate it. So yes, going back to this illustration for the final final touch. So as you can see here. I made sure to transition this image into grayscale, and with that I am just doing a quick copy of all that I have seen in here turning off the ink layer, and that is a very important because you kind of don’t want your ink edges to be all feathery, so I tend to turn off the ink layer and just leave the tone layer and from there, I turned that layer from grayscale to Bitmap, keeping it at 62 45-degree angles and then copy/paste or rather copy, and then let it undo it. Undo until you go back to having your layers and then pasting it over right now. I’m just doing a bit of cleaning because I tend to like to keep clean layers, so I go ahead and merge all of my gray scales into one layer and from there, I go ahead and paste on my bitmap or my halftone screen layer into the image and then turn on the inks and voila, so just a quick little recap as I said, you just go ahead and paste in or draw in your Grays like you normally would, but in solid shapes, then after that, making sure your documents in grayscale layer, then, of course, copying your grayscale layer, making that into a bitmap and keeping it to the 6040 and general want to keep make sure that your difference in shades are strong enough and, of course, going in and just doing maybe little final little touches. And, of course, that brush would be really helpful here. It’s already dead and you can go in and cross it hatch and whatnot, and by all means if you have any questions or comments or requests. Leave them down in the comments below all the best to guys thanks for watching [Music].