Customer Reviews:
 You'll never buy another greeting card again! September 3, 2008
Jr Lorrimer (Oakworth)
This is a great piece of software that has paid for itself many times over, I've used it for all sorts of cards, posters, invites, magazines etc.
It's very intuitive and has some great font designs. Drag and drop from I-Photo is an absolute doddle. My only gripe would be that it's sometimes a bit slow and selecting between objects isn't as easy as it could be.
 Magnificent June 1, 2006
Martin Turner (Birmingham, England)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Every so often a piece of software comes into your life that is so beautifully conceived, so perfect and so simple that you want to own it, whether you have any use for it or not. ComicLife is exactly that -- although, once you've tried it, you discover that there are actually many more uses than you perhaps thought.
Few people can resist the lure of reading a page of a graphic novel, or a cartoon strip. Unfortunately, drawing them is an artform all in itself, which may take many years to master.
The beauty of ComicLife is that it can take your digital photographs (or, for the even more digitally inclined, your Poser renderings) and turn them effortlessly into many styles of comic illustration. This means that even if your pictures look like just a jumble of different shots when they come out of the camera, they will all appear to be done to a style when you actually use them. Excellent.
It does all the layout work for you, with many options of different kinds of comic grids, and has many suitable comic styles of type - not just comic fonts, but also distortions and effects which are 'just like the real thing'.
Just to keep things fun, whenever it does anything, it makes an 'ooh' or 'ah' or applause sound.
And it's so easy to use.
Despite being simple and simple to use, it plays nicely with applications like Photoshop, and enables you to composite with alpha-channels on the fly.
Of course, you'll never achieve the kind of depth and immediacy that graphic novellists and comic writers get unless you set yourself to learn something of their craft, and, ultimately, if you don't know how to tell a story, then this won't help you. But if you just want to give some life to your holiday snaps, or create an effective poster, or use comic elements in other graphic media, this application will get you there quickly and easily. And, if you do have the skills to produce a graphical work of art, ComicLife will take out an awful lot of the hard slog.
So how good is it? Well, good enough that Apple now include the basic version with every Intel Processor Mac. But get the deluxe version anyway... it's... well... better.
Absolutely fantastic! April 30, 2006
M. A. Gilchrist (Bradford, West Yorkshire United Kingdom)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
That's it!
OK, since you want more detail, here goes. Comic Life is an extremely simple program to use and, when you've tried it for a couple of minutes, addictive. You choose a page layout ... from early comics, through manga, to futuristic/modern. You then browse either a folder of pictures or your iPhoto library (did I say it was MAC only? There are plaintive cries over at plasq.com for a PC version) and drop them into the boxes. Resizing and clipping done automatically, although some resizing and rotating is possible.
If you are running Tiger on your mac there are also filters available to make the photos more "comic-booky". Then add captions and speech balloons and you're away. The final thing can be exported to several graphics formats, HTML, or even directly sent to your .Mac account.
Who would use such a quirky piece of software? Well, I thought it would get old quickly, until I thought about it. Yes, simple comics out of photos are a bit "jackie" photo story but what about any scrapbookers out there? How about step by step instructions for replacing the battery on an iPod? As a teacher I have used it as a way of reminding students how to carry out their experimental work.
Go on. Download a copy for yourself. Have a play. You will be hooked!
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