Hello Deviant Art and World! Notes on Toning!

Well uh hello there! 

I'll try and make this short. Something is goin on in my body right now... Something...telling me, to be more active and write more! haha I've been contemplating which website I should be sharing my thoughts, discoveries, ideas, tuturials with the world. I'd also like to know how many people are actually here reading this very blog. Maybe deviant art IS the place to be sharing all of this. If you are out there, can I get a show of "hands"(Replies) as to who actually pays attention to these journals. I use to keep a journal on blogspot.com and I was considering starting a new one there. But that would mean I have to drag every new person there. Where here, there's already a small following. I just want to make sure I can share my images directly on the journal. I want to be more active here. I do youtube, but that isn't really a practical way to share my thoughts, so I thought, hey! Why not just go back to blogging. I always get these, moments where I say to myself. Dang, that's a good topic to cover on my youtube, or do a tutorial on. Or maybe it's just an idea I want to share with the world, new things, tips tricks, revelations, I discover a long the way, and I'm like, DAM, I should write that down. So here I am. I'm gonna start doing this. I actually had a dream that pushed me to do this. It said, Jettyjetjetterson.. blog more! It was a brilliant dream. It makes so much sense! I mean, I'm always so busy with work, I can't really touch base with you guys via youtube on a regular basis, but I can definitely write! And writing doesn't take much energy at all. At the same time, anything that I write down, can be covered further in a future video. Heres a random thing I cam across and needed note taking..dam I knew I should've wrote this down when It came to me, cause now it's a bit fuzzy. 

(Warnning** If you are dealing with issues like this, then all of this will sound quite facsinating, but if not, just skip over it, and wait for something that fit's you're particular issues. )
For example, Tips screen toning on Manga Studio 5. When choosing tones, it is important to know that "Number of tone lines" is default 60 and density is the value you choose. So I want a darker value, choose higher density value, 20 is darker then 10 but the default "number of tone lines" is set to 60. Meaning 60 lines of dots for that value. BUT WAIT! Thats NOT the best way of toning your drawing. Because number of tone lines is set to 60 FOR ALL OF THEM!!! This is a problem when exporting. When you have multiple tones stacked on each other, it becomes over compressed "distorted" or, if the you have to tones on to separate layers but share the same "number or lines" as well as "density" THEY WILL NOT APPEAR AT ALL WHEN EXPORTED!!!! CRAAAAP! This means, if I had a sweater with a value tone(density) set to 20 and also a shadow tone set to 20 with both "number of tone lines" set to 60, the shadows WILL NOT appear at all in the exported version. The first thing I would think to do is, Lower the 'number or tone lines" right? well this is the first thing I tried, I found the sweet spot was around 27!!!! yes, 27. But it depends on the actually drawing. Sometimes it will look better at 23-27, depending on the number of shadows or or flat values you ohave for your drawing. Still the tones could look better. That's where the super revelation happened. The problem I was having was mainly because I was treating the manga as an illustration. I could see every other amatuer manga artist making the sammmmmmee mistake to fix it the way I have. Although using 27 of the "number of tone lines" is good it's not the proper way an authentic manga would go about toning their manga. For toning manga and making it look elegant like a pro, it is is important, not to even go too denser, 20 seems like a light gray, but it is probably as dark as you want to get it. Mater of fact keeping the density way way low like 8 or nine is suffice. At this low, you will see each individual dot, but that is the nature of tone, just like cross hatching. The dots maybe very evident, but because there are clusters if them they still act as a nice value. So don't go desne, stay low and experiment.

To make it easier to understand.
"number of tone lines" = HOW MANY DOTS YOU ARE USING
density = How big are each individual dots. 
The properties where you adjust all of this can be found in "Layer Property" under The Window dropdown menu.

So this is an example of something I discovered for myself and would definitely become fuzzy the longer I don't play with it. So it will serve as notes for myself, but also anyone else Who might find it usefull, and now I got perfect notes for a youtube video, but It's here now for people who would need it here and now. I had to learn it once, and it could be weeks months or years before I touched this topic again and I would have forgotten all of this by then. And had to relearn it. NOT UH! not anymore, this is written down for eternity! So thats it! Take care and Pattapat pat peace!

Love and gratitude,
Jet

Heres a picture just to test out the embedding!