#I also had lots of fun with the fancy brushes in ibispaint (:

[shy-sapphic-ace]

Turns out organizing artists into categories is really fun, I should do this more often. Anyway, my favourite music genre right now is whatever all of these is

[bnha-transparents]

How do you make the manga caps transparent?

oh, i have been waiting for this question.

before i start, i’d like to say that i make all of my transparents on my iPhone. my tool of choice? my finger, and the app ibispaint x. i’m sure there are quicker and better ways to make transparents (scratch that: i know there are quicker and better ways to make transparents), but this way is fun for me. feels a bit like i’m coloring a coloring book.

the tutorial is under the cut because i go into quite a bit of detail!

alright, here we go!!

(i blocked out everything in this image outside of the part that we actually care about, because this is a page from a recent chapter.)

STEP 1: alright, so we got a page from the manga with this adorable little shinsou, which we’re going to make transparent. ideally, get a page that has solid black lines, and that doesn’t have little stray fuzzy bits outside of the lines. otherwise your life just becomes a whole lot harder. the reason i prefer not to do earlier chapters is because the website that i use to get pages doesn’t have good quality images of the first hundred or so chapters, and i’m too lazy to find another website. so what we’re gonna wanna do is… 

STEP 2: crop the manga page to the part you actually care about! you can also do this in the app that i’m going to use, but i just prefer to do with the photos app. nice and easy.

STEP 3: when you open ibispaint x, there’ll be three options, “my gallery”, “collection”, and “online gallery”. pick “my gallery”, and it’ll take you to a screen that looks something like what’s pictured above. click that fancy little plus button indicated in the image to start a new canvas!

STEP 4: the option you want to pick is import picture.

STEP 5: alright, there’s our shinsou! we’re just gonna click on him, pretty easy, right? also yes, i have an album on my phone dedicated solely to manga caps that i plan to make transparent.

STEP 6: the moment you click the image, it’ll take you to a canvas and ask if you want to extract the drawing. you’re going to hit “OK”, because extracting the drawing makes it so that all the white areas in the image become transparent, leaving only the black and grey.

NOTE: this won’t quite work properly if the background isn’t pure #ffffff white! if you are making a transparent from someone else’s manga cap, make sure that the manga cap has pure white values. if it does not, there will be a very light, barely detectable film of nearly transparent grey values, but it isn’t full transparency. this means if someone uses your transparent over something like…say, a solid colored background, the colored background will appear darker in the final image. there’s a way to get rid of this film, but it’s hard to explain, so please ask me if you want to know how to do this. heroacacaps is a very popular blog that editors get their manga caps from, but their images do not have a pure white background. (it’s kind of funny, i can often spot when someone made their transparents using a manga cap from heroacacaps.)

OPTIONAL STEP: if you are using ibispaint x for importing anything that you don’t want to make transparent, then 99% of the time, you are going to want to hit “cancel”. also, this ONLY works well for black and white images, and trying it on a colored image with make the image turn monochrome. you can still use it on some colored images with white backgrounds, but it you need a few extra steps to make it work (hint: clipping layers, if you know how to use those. duplicate the extracted layer until it is completely black without creating black values outside of the lines, and merge the layers down into one layer. clip the original image over this layer. ask me if you ever want me to go further into detail!)

STEP 7: once you hit “OK”, this will pop up!! if you are using a good image where the lines are solid black values, the default option will be perfect for you.

click the green checkmark once you’re satisfied with the appearance of the image!

OPTIONAL STEP: you can manipulate these numbers if you need to. i find this useful for making the lines on sketches clearer. increasing the black percentage makes middle grey values appear darker, and decreasing the white percentage makes middle grey values appear lighter. the white percentage cannot be lower than the black percentage. i’m…not quite sure how to explain what the middle percentage manipulates, but you can mess around with it and see what happens.

STEP 8: so we’ve got the image on the canvas, but now we have a bunch of stuff in the background. to get rid of it, hit the little brush icon, and click the eraser icon. if you’re not sure what the eraser icon looks like, the next image has an image of it in the location where the brush icon was.

next, just…use your finger (or a stylus if you’re fancy) and erase away all of that outside stuff!

OPTIONAL STEP: some manga caps require the extra step of drawing any parts that were covered by things like text bubbles and other characters. it’s sometimes the most tiring part of the whole process, and i can’t really tell you how to do it. you just have to experiment with the available tools. there are lots of brush options you can try to imitate the way the lines look, if you click the button to the right of the brush icon, and there are also (painful and tedious) ways to replicate more complicated textures. i often have to do this step which is why i have an entire goddamn tag dedicated to transparents i needed to patch up.

if there was only one reason i had to pick for why you should respect the people who give you manga caps without backgrounds for you to use in their edits, it’s because a lot of times, they patch up manga caps without any comment. some replicate the actual style so well that you’ll have never realized that the person you got the manga cap from added in their own bits. here’s an example. this transparent? it took an hour. just look at the original, and consider how many different areas are covered by text. imagine how many different textures and lines that have to be replicated.

STEP 9: alright! now we’re ready to actually make this sucker a proper transparent image. this image is actually just lines, and if you stop here, you’ll only have the outline of the image! what we’re going to have to do is take parts that we don’t want to be transparent, and color them white. unfortunately, this is the bulk of the work, most of the time. to do this while still keeping the outline intact, we’ll have to use layers. hit the button with the rectangles stacked on top of each other to open the layers menu.

STEP 10: hit the plus button to create a new layer, and make sure to move it underneath the layer with the manga cap. i actually like to make two layers, with the lowest one having a color that’s dark, but not too dark. this added layer makes it easier for me to see what i’m coloring, and i really recommend it. if you don’t do this, you’ll have to hit one of the checkerboard patterns next to the word “Background” located underneath the layers. ideally the darker one, it’s easier to see the white on it.

STEP 11: hit the eraser icon and click the brush icon again to be able to draw! and now, it’s just simple coloring. if you’ve ever used a coloring book, then this might evoke feelings of nostalgia within you, because this is basically just a glorified digital page of a coloring book.

i like to color the parts closest to the line first with a small brush size capable of getting in corners (use the little slider next to the text that says “4.8″ in the image to change the brush size). it’s not that helpful for a transparent as simple as this, but more complicated transparents with lots of corners to color make this step a blessing. or maybe that’s just me.

STEP 12: aaaaand finish coloring all of it, with a bigger brush size. if you colored near the lines first like i mentioned in the previous step, then this will feel a lot more like using a coloring book than the previous step.

STEP 13: alright! if you used a colored layer underneath to help you see the white, then you’re going to want to hit the little eye button on the colored layer to make it invisible. after all, we do want the image to be transparent.

STEP 14: next, there are three background options underneath the list of layers, next to the word “Background”. if you want your image to actually be transparent, do not pick the solid white option. pick either of the checkerboard options, both will give you a transparent image.

STEP 15: you’re done! now just to save the image. click the little arrow pointing left on the bottom right of the screen. this will exit you out of the canvas, and back to your gallery.

STEP 16: click the button indicated in the above image.

STEP 17: the above will pop up, click “photo (transparent png)” to save the image as a transparent image.

STEP 18: click save image!

and that’s it. you should have yourself one gorgeous transparent in your photos. i would probably suggest checking the image to make sure that it isn’t transparent in areas that you don’t want it to be.