Clip Studio Paint EX

About Clip Studio Paint EX

The brush engine is why illustrators move to this application and stay. Pen and pencil tools respond to pressure, tilt and speed with a feel much closer to physical media than a general purpose editor manages, ink lines taper naturally, and the stabiliser smooths a shaky stroke without making it feel disconnected from the hand. Brushes are built from their own settings rather than being fixed presets, and the community brush library is enormous.

The comic tools are the part no general editor has. Panels are cut from a frame border layer and stay editable, speech balloons are drawn with tails that attach to a speaker, text sits inside them with proper vertical and horizontal typesetting, and the screen tone system produces printed halftone patterns rather than grey fills. Perspective rulers snap strokes to one, two or three vanishing points, and the drawable posable figures give a reference for anatomy and hands.

The EX tier is the multi page one, and that difference matters for anything longer than a single illustration. A whole book is managed as one file with page order, spreads, running page numbers and a story structure, pages export as a batch, and text across every page is searchable and exportable for translation work. The lower tier handles one canvas at a time, which becomes impossible on a long project.

Animation is included rather than being a separate product. A timeline handles frame by frame work with onion skinning, light table references, cel management and layer folders as animation layers, and the result exports as a movie or an image sequence. For short animated pieces built from the same drawings as the illustration work, it removes an entire application from the pipeline.

What is included in this build

• Pressure, tilt and speed sensitive brush engine with fully editable brush settings
• Stroke stabilisation and natural line tapering for inking
• Panel and frame border tools that stay editable across a page
• Speech balloons with attaching tails and vertical or horizontal typesetting
• Screen tone system producing printed halftone patterns rather than grey fills
• Perspective rulers snapping strokes to one, two or three vanishing points
• Multi page story management with spreads, page numbering and batch export
• Frame by frame animation timeline with onion skinning and cel management

Changed in version 5.0.4

• Faster canvas performance at very large print resolutions
• Improved brush response on high report rate tablets
• Additional default brush and tone sets included
• Better text handling across multi page story files
• Reduced file size on documents with many raster layers

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Install the tablet driver from the hardware vendor before starting.
2. Extract the archive to a folder with a short path.
3. Run the installer as administrator.
4. Choose the interface language and the additional material downloads on first launch.
5. Set the canvas default resolution to match the intended output before starting a project.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title