ComicBook! – iPhone App of the Week
This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive.
This week’s App is ComicBook!
ComicBook! is the FULL featured comic book creation app!
In only seconds, turn yourself and your friends into comic heroes or villains. Be the star in your own comic book adventures.
Realistic comic styling with a wide selection of: image filters, comic fonts, customizable captions, a library of classic comic graphics and dozens of multi-panel page layouts.
£1.49
If you downloaded Halftone recently following my review of it a few weeks ago and are now looking to do something more than just the single image in Halftone then you might want to have a look at one of the more dedicated comic creation app.
If you have an iPhone or iPod touch then I would suggest you have a look at ComicBook!
It allows you to quickly create a comic strip using existing photographs or you can take some with your built in camera. You can, after choosing a layout add those images, either from the library or take them with the camera.
There is a big choice of layouts and a bit of planning in advance will help in making the right choice at the start. If you change the layout later, you will find that you have to reapply all the comic effects again to your images.
There is a choice of special FX that you can apply to comicfy the images and turn the photographs from photographs to what looks like handdrawn or printed images.
My preference would be to use a different application such as ToonPaint to create the comic images, as though I do like the ComicBook! effects, there isn’t much room for image adjustments apart from the halfton effect, so you might get a better effect using another application and then importing those resulting images into ComicBook!.
Once you’ve sorted the images you can add captions and speech bubbles, as well as a title. There is room for changing fonts and colours.
There are some “stickers” you can use, though you can change the size and orientation of the stickers you can’t actually edit the text of the stickers which is a pity.
Once you’ve done, you can either save to your phone, e-mail or share via Twitter or Facebook. There are various other settings depending on how you want to use the final comic strip.
If you have an iPad then I really do like Comic Life and it certainly matches the desktop experience. Though I think £5.49 is really good value, you might not want to spend that much on an iPad app for creating comics. ComicBook! which is cheaper at £1.49 also has the advantage that it is an universal app so works on the iPhone and the iPod touch, whereas Comic Life is iPad only.
The interface for ComicBook! does work better on the iPad, which is down to the larger screen.
If you like the idea of using comics to support learning or to allow the learners an opportunity to make comics themselves then an app like ComicBook! is a great way of making quick and easy comics using photographs or the camera.
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