First and foremost, if you get that obscure reference above, a medal for you! For those that don’t, you’re not missing anything. :)

If you’ve got a new iMac or new MacBook Pro or “others”, then you SHOULD know that you’ve got a really nifty piece of software installed called Comic Life. Some people have compared this to the old Comic Strip Factory on OS9 but that program came with a bunch of clip art you used to create your comics. What do you use with Comic Life?

YOU!

Using connections to your iPhoto library (or even your omnipresent iSight) you can grab any graphic, take it into the program and have an utterly excellent time!

Now, the wheels are turning and you’re thinking,”I could use those graphics in iWeb! I’ll just do a copy and paste and oh, the webtoons I could create!” You’ll want to stop those wheels right about now. Without going into a lot of detail involving clipboards, formats, and harvest moons, let’s just say that you can’t copy from Comic Life 1.2.4 (latest version as of this writing) so don’t even try.

OK, go ahead, I know you have to “learn for yourself”. Yes, I know you can copy from one Comic Life page to another, you just can’t copy into any other application!! Now, are we finished?

Yes, now’s the part where I tell you how I got the above graphic into iWeb without using Comic Life’s “Export” options. Again, in the form of a recipe.

Makentosh’s Comic Life Pict-o-port

1 copy of Comic Life

    (either included on computer or bought)

    in a pinch, Comic Life Deluxe may be substituted

1 copy of Preview (free with OSX)

1 cropping tool (included with Preview)

First, create what I like to call a “work of art”. For the above masterpiece, I took the default artwork for Apple’s “Black” iWeb theme and applied the “Graphite Sky” filter in Comic Life. Then, I drug in some lettering and applied “Hard Drop Transparent - Use over a photo”. Grabbing a corner of the lettering, I held down shift then clicked and dragged a corner to enlarge it proportionately. I drug in a rectangular bit of lettering for the always appropriate “Meanwhile” text. And finally, I held my fingers over the keyboard for some time... attempting to divine exactly what this longboard surfer was thinking. This took approximately 3 and a half hours, but I believe I’ve recorded the deep true meaning. That was indeed satisfying.

Now, on to the part where I include pictures! Now that you’ve got your comic just the way you wanted it, one shortcut is to use good ‘ol command-shift-4 to take a picture of what you’ve created. Hey, the screenshot solution was fine for Macromind’s ComicWorks a looong time ago, right? Well, yes, but when you’re living in a world of more than two colors (black and white), that white background just isn’t gonna cut it. Maybe in PowerPoint for Windows, but not over here, buddy.

So how do we get it into a more friendly PDF format? If you raised your hand and said,”Print to PDF” congratulate yourself on your knowledge of “obscure workarounds”. The problem with that PDF though, is that it’s still surrounded by a stark expanse of white (the size of the document you’re printing). To do this right, we need to enlist Comic Life’s help by tweaking a couple of settings.

We start by clicking on the “Details” tab on the right, then clicking the FILL button. This brings up the control for setting the colors. We’re not after color though, WE’RE after Opacity. Grab the gadget and take it allll the way over to zero. What you should see after making the change should be something that looks a little like the graphic to the left. Don’t be alarmed that everything’s gone dark. In Comic Life, zero opacity is the new black. Now, there’s one more change to make it complete. This time we start by clicking on File and choosing Page Format... Here, you’ll see a “Paper Color”

control. Click it and in your friendly neighborhood color picker, take the opacity to zero. After you click Ok, this will have the effect of removing that white border. Now, your image will be completely transparent save for your graphics. Time to go for the PDF workaround again.

Bring up the Print dialog (File -> Print) and right there between PDF and Supplies... you’ll find Preview.

Why actually save a PDF (to be deleted later) when we can work with and edit one from within Apple’s own Preview? Once the Preview window is open, you’ll see basically the same thing you’d seen before. Because of the changes you made in ComicLife, though, everything other than your image is transparent, is that clear? Now is when you may want to trim up your artwork before bringing it into iWeb.

That’s what the Crop tool is for. Once you select the tool, your cursor will turn into cross-hairs. By clicking to begin selecting the area you want to keep, the image will show the area outside your selection as darker than the inside. This helps with making sure you frame it just right. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right on the first try, just grab one of the grey corner points to adjust your selection. Once it’s perfect, you’ll go to Tools and choose Crop.

A dialog box will pop up giving you some information about PDF blah blah non-destructive blah blah content. Just click Crop and it’ll happily go away.

Now is the part we’ve been waiting for! Copy this cropped image and Paste it into iWeb and there you have it! Including any transparency you may have set in the original. How wonderful is THAT!!?? And you didn’t even have to save a document to your hard drive only to delete it after using it. Now some of you are probably thinking,”Hmph and balderdash! I could have accomplished an identical venture just by utilizing File -> Export -> Export to Image(s)... and not this rigamarole! Piffle!” Well, yes, you could have done something that would have looked nice and you’d just have to delete that file once you’re done, BUT, what if, once you got it into iWeb, you realized you wanted to resize it? As a PDF object, you get all the vector based might of that format for free. On the right, you’ll see two examples of the “W” used above. One uses Comic Life’s default image export resolution, the other uses PDF. Could you increase the resolution when you export? Yes, but if you’re using iWeb, which creates the appropriate resolution when it creates the images for your webpages, why not just give it the best possible image to create from?

One other thing, I did the above TWICE. Once for the image frame and once for the lettering. This way, they’re still separate in case I wanted to, say, give the lettering a shadow separate from the frame or use the Adjust tools on the image without affecting the text. Just a little extra tweaking room.