How Do You Use Manga Studio 5.0

[TomSawyer]

I just got it

I'm still new to this technology
Anyone have some quick guides or something?

[carloswebcomic]

Check Youtube. Lots of good tutorials there.
Manga Studio is fairly complex for those who have never used other software like Photoshop, but it's also a very powerful tool.
Take your time learning and you'll be surprised all the cool stuff you can do with it.

Also, Manga Studio 5 is also known as Clip Studio Paint. You can search for tutorials with that name too.

[Greg_Dickson]

There's so much to learn about Clip Studio Paint (Manga Studio), that it's staggering. I've been using it for a month and there's still so much that I don't know about. The most important tool I learned about in the beginning is the Pen Stabilizer, if you're not familiar with that. When using a pen/pencil/brush type (I'm a big fan of the G Pen, for example), you'll see in the menu provided with it that there's a Stabilization option with 5 blocks in it. The rightmost block will fully stabilize your strokes, which is insanely helpful for smoothing out your line work and inking. I highly recommend trying this as one of the first things you do, as it can be really discouraging to be making these wobbly, choppy lines when you first start out. Also, don't forget to start your artwork on higher resolutions like 300 dpi, and then when you're finished your artwork/page, go into the Edit Bar, and then Change Image Resolution, to scale your dpi down to 72 dpi for posting online (keep it at 300 or so if you want to print it), as well as shrink the image's width to 940 pixels or lower to fit Tapastic's dimensions. And always keep multiple save files of each project you work on, just in case you screw up somewhere along the way. It's better than starting all the way over. By the time you're done, keep a Clip file of your image in case you need to edit it later, and make a png or jpeg file for posting it online.

Layering, text and word bubbles, gradients, using the rectangle and line tools for panelling, and paint types (like oil paints and such for backgrounds) are also very important standard things to educate yourself on, if you're not familiar with them. Online tutorials on youtube are probably your best bet for learning most of your info. Don't try to absorb everything at once, and then apply it. Learn each new little thing at a time and put it into practice before moving onto the next thing you're interested in learning about.

[Rabbit]

Aw man, I love Clip Studio so much like you have no idea XD It's an amazing program, and once you get used to it, I've found it's hard to use anything else. I also have Sai but I almost never use it because Clip Studio can just do so much more, in my opinion.
When I first started with it, I read the tutorials on the Official Clip Studio Website. Celsys, the company that owns Clip Studio, also has a Youtube, with beginner videos like this one
And when I had trouble trying to figure out how to do a particular thing, I would just search youtube for a quick tutorial (example: searching youtube for 'how to copy and paste in clip studio' gets me this)
And also, just like Greg says above, always turn up the stabilizers. Maybe not ALL the way.. sometimes lines can come out blocky then, but most of the way.
And once you learn the basics, there's tons of awesome stuff like overlays, snap-to-grid, animation.. it's a great program! XD
Also, is this your first time drawing digitally? Or have you used other digital programs before this? Because if you have only done traditional art before this, I can give you some links for help specifically with digital art ^^

[TomSawyer]

@Rabbit

Well
I started with Paint, and it was very basic, so this is a big upgrade for me

I also have Adobe Photoshop, but I never used it in-depth

Nice Name BTW

[Rabbit]

Thanks!
I also started with Paint ^^
I don't know much about Photoshop, but I know a lot of people use that for art, so maybe you should try and use that as well (although like I said, I know nothing about it, so it may be harder than Clip Studio/Manga Studio).
Something that really helped me out when I first started digital art was the tutorials on Pixiv Spotlight - a subsection of Pixiv, a Japanese art site, kinda like their DeviantArt.
Pixiv Spotlight itself is translated into English, but a lot of the tutorials are in Japanese; oddly enough, this doesn't really matter. You can pretty much tell what's going on anyway. They have regular art tutorials and ones specifically for coloring digitally, and they helped me a lot with coloring XD
The art style on Pixiv is, being a Japanese website, more anime/manga like, but of course almost all of the tutorials can be used for other styles as well. They also have some color palettes, which is an AWESOME help when starting out digital art.
Something else I should mention is that Clip Studio is VERY customizable.
If you go to the 'window' tab, you can check and uncheck everything you want to be visible. It's a little confusing at first, because I remember when I started I wasn't sure what everything did, so I didn't know if I wanted to see it or not, but honestly, everything can be checked again once you uncheck it, so if it's in your way and you don't know what it is, just get rid of it for now.
The color palette, which is probable the MOST IMPORTANT part of any art program, is also customizable.
Right above it there are little tabs, and by clicking them you can change what type of color wheel/palette you're using. You can also move it all around to any corner you want, by click-and-drag.
You also need to familiarize yourself to what the icons on the left do; they're super important. I'm sure you've already realized that the brush icon takes you to brushes, as the pencil icon takes you to pencils, but the slightly more confusing icons are super important too, like the blend icon (2 raindops fusing together), and the select icon (a rectangle made with a dotted line).
Another thing that helped me start out with Clip Studio was watching speedpaints online; speedpaints aren't really made to be informative, but they sorta teach you the very basics if you don't know, like color the skin first, and how to shade, and how colors can be changed after you draw them.. I make speedpaints in Clip Studio, and there's tons of other awesome ones too.

[sebastien181]

Create a shortcut for flipping the canvas! Flipping the canvas gives you a new perspective on what you are drawing and mistakes you would not have noticed otherwise. I have "flip horizantal" as "ctrl f".