How to Turn Your Photos into Comics with Pages
How to Turn Your Photos into Comics with Pages
Turn friends and family into heroes with a comic book story made in Pages
Your Mac provides you with a number of options to turn your photos into works of art, but one that you might not have considered is to craft your images into your own comic book. Following some simple principles and using a range of Pages features, you can quickly build your own visual story by adding images to a document and positioning them in order. The process isn’t as difficult as you might think and offers a fun way to share your photos with friends and family, complete with your own text to help tell the story.
If you want to use existing photos for your story, you can still piece together a related set to form a timeline, as we have done in our example. However, if you do have a comic book sequence in mind when you take your photographs, you’ll find it much easier to produce a linear timeline.
In this tutorial we show you how to create the comic book background and add images with frames. Positioning your images is a key step, as it helps to tell the story and to use the space available to fit each image alongside the others. Once you’ve positioned your images in order, you can add captions and speech bubbles using Pages’ Shapes menu. You can create as many comic book pages as you want and, when the comic is complete, print it out or export it as a PDF so you can share it with friends.
What You’ll Need:
>> Pages '09
1. Create the background
Create a new, blank, page layout project in Pages, either portrait or landscape in orientation. Select a square from the Shapes menu, click the fill color on the toolbar and select black from the menu. Drag the square out to fill the entire canvas and select Lock from the Arrange menu.
2. Add an image
Click the Media button and drag your first image onto the canvas. With the image selected, click the Inspector button, then the Graphic Inspector tab. Click Picture Frame from the Stroke menu and choose the second frame style from the drop-down. Move the Scale slider to around 50%.
3. Position your images
Drag the image into position at the top-left of the canvas and resize it using the edge handles, making sure to leave a gap between the image and the canvas edge. Continue to add images in the same way. Adjust and vary the size of each image for a comic book effect.
4. Mask images
Enhance the layout by focusing on a picture’s subject. To remove background and show more of the subject, select the image and choose "Mask with Shape" then Rectangle from the Format menu. Adjust the image size using the Edit Mask slider or resize the mask by clicking and dragging the edges.
5. Lock your images
Once you’ve added images, you should lock them so they can’t be accidentally moved. To do so, select them all by holding ß and clicking each in turn. Now select Lock from the Arrange menu to lock all of them in place. To unlock an image, select it and click Unlock from the Arrange menu.
6. Add captions, speech bubbles
From the Shapes menu, select rounded rectangle (or circle, for speech) and choose white from the fill menu on the toolbar. From the Inspector’s Graphic Inspector tab, select Line from the Stroke menu, set the line colour to black and set a size of two points. Position the shape over your image.
7. Edit captions, speech bubbles
Adjust the size of caption shapes and speech bubbles and click Text Box from the toolbar. Write a caption or speech into the text box and choose a fun font from the font menu on the toolbar. Drag the text box over the top of your caption or bubble shape and adjust font and text box size to fit.
8. Share your comic book
Continue to add pages to your comic using the Pages button from the toolbar. When you’re happy, select Print from the File menu. Alternatively, select Export from the Share menu and opt to save your comic as a PDF document so you can send it to friends and family.
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