Oh gosh, I've been meaning to make a tutorial or something to explain this, but the short version is I do a LOT with layer modes. 1 layer of simple cel shading, then layering on overlay layers in different colors to build subtle depth and tool with the colors. I also use color balance adjustment layers on... almost all of my pages, just to push it in the right direction for the mood.

Habit mostly?

It's the program I learned on, and I was only forced by necessity to move to CSP. (An update to Win 10 decided that my PS program was obsolete and made it a huge resource hog. Like lock up and not want to work resource hog. No matter what I did to get it fixed it didn't help. )

While I like CSP for some things, I miss some of the more intuitive functions of PS.

Here's a couple of tips that I've been given by professional artists far more talented than me...

-Conserve energy. If your focus should be on the character and an elaborate background wouldn't add to the story, why are you making the effort? It distracts from the real focus of the page and it will take a lot longer.
-If you have a crowd scene, do you need lots of detailed art and lots of speech bubbles? Pick one. (An example of this is the lecture hall scene in Carla Speed McNeil's "Mystery Date", if anyone's a FINDER fan?)
-Thicker, spontaneous inking can save time over finicky detailed line art and is sometimes more effective (Of course, sometimes you need to put in a lot of detail so people can see what's going on).
-Reuse panels if you have to. If you have two panels with characters in the exact same poses, why draw them twice? Copy and paste. Bear in mind that if their expressions change their posture might change as well.
-If you're really struggling with something, ask for help rather than continuing to wrestle with the problem for hours. Your time could be spent more productively.
-Don't be afraid to trace if you can't get it right otherwise. Especially good for drawing ellipses (MY NEMESIS).
-It's not cheating if it works.

-Special mention to my most hated anime timesaving tip, when characters speak with something over their mouths (teacup, hand, fan ect.) so the animator doesn't have to bother with lip synching. I'm sure there's a comic equivalent...

Disclaimer:I am very bad at taking my own advice.

Photoshop actions! They take a little effort to learn, but once you start making macros for boring repetitive tasks you'll never go back.

Here are the one's I use most. Ghost adds effects to my ghost character layer. Mobile Panel adds a border to the selected panel(s) and saves it out for tapastic.



Also, hotkeys. To know them is to love them. Make your own for things like flipping the canvas.

There is a lot of good stuff in this thread, but I want to call this out specifically because I'm pretty sure it just changed the game for me (I'm currently working, so as much as I want to, I can't just drop everything and start messing around with CSP). This is going to save me so much time.

Dooooo iiiiiittttt!


Hmm. It sucks that you can't use PS any more ... I feel for you having to find your way round a new program. I guess since you have everything else in PS format, it'd make sense to keep saving those files if you can, as I recall most art programs open PS files, but not the other way round.


YES.
I don't even need to look it up, I know which page you mean


Amen to that. Though people can wildly disagree about whether something has actually worked or not, especially when it comes to tracing and copy and paste. But I did a copy and paste just this week, so I ain't judging.

Oh another GREAT time Saver in CSP? Sampling is as easy as right click. So you paint along right click to sample another color and just keep on painting. I LOVE that.

THANK YOU. I've been trying to find a better way to do word bubbles and Photoshop doesn't have a very easy means (that I've found yet) to doing them. Just downloaded Inkscape to give it a try today.

Sage:

Here are a couple of tutorials I put together for PS that involve using Paths...

Regular speech bubbles:
https://tigershark06.deviantart.com/art ... -217556951

Organic speech bubbles:
https://tigershark06.deviantart.com/art ... -351527466

This should help you with making your speech bubbles in a fairly quick manner!

Not bad! This is a bit faster than and much more standardized/technical than what I currently do. Def will be doing this from now on Ty vm!

Improvement!

Glad to hear they were useful for you!