How to make gender bender photo comics

 Michelle Phoenix asked for a tutorial on how to make your own photo comics. Here it is!

So the task is to make a photo comic of the kind we publish here at Fem Fluxx. Basically these are regular comics, the main difference being that we make use of photos and not drawings. That being said, much of what we do here, can be used for other types of images as well.

You will need:

• Images
• Screen snapshot software
• Photo editing software
• A comic editor
• A PDF shrinker
• A place to upload and host your comics
• A site where you can publish the comics

Images

I am not going to conclude on the legality of using the imagery of others here. We are making mashups of existing imagery and turning it into something new and different. Secondly, we are giving away the comics for free. And thirdly, we are clearly showing where the original images come from, providing advertising for them in the process.

You must decide on how to handle the intellectual property challenge on your part.

You may, of course, take your own photos, but given that the nature of crossdreamer storytelling and the need for anonymity, I would guess most of us will make use of the imagery of others. In our case we use adult films from various companies, paying for most of them, although I am sure some would rather use torrents. Again: That is up to you.

You need a lot of photos, as any scene you may write will require different scenes and facial expressions. Indeed, when you have decided on the model or actor used to depict the main character (normally a woman in MTF transformation stories), it makes sense to get hold of several movies where she plays the lead or an important role. You might also want one or two with an actor/model presenting the  pre-transformation "transformee".

Xing Xing tells me that she might end up with as many as 10 movies before she stops looking for more. She says:

"Sometimes I find a movie or a photo that grabs hold of me and demands to be turned into a story. This video is the point of origin. I then go on to find other videos with the same actor that can be used to expand upon the narrative."

Mind you, her comics are long, more than 100 panels long for the most part. If you makes shorter stories, you might not need that many movies.

She argues that you must free yourself from the story told in the movie. Porn movies plots are for the most part boring and not directly gender bending, so you have to find another angle.

Screen snapshots

1080p videos are the best. Lower resolutions may look good on phones but not on larger computer screens. 4K videos take up to much storage space.

You may grab screenshots manually using the given shortcuts found in the operating system or using special screen-grabbing apps. That works well if you need relatively few screenshots, but if you need more, you might want to automatize the process.

Xing Xing uses the Elmedia Player for Mac, which has a feature where it can record a series of snapshots from a movie. Xing Xing uses a screenshot interval of 1 second, and yes, that leads to a lot of photos, so you will need some space for them.

Screengrabber and Imagegrab reportedly do the same in Windows.

Photo editing software

You need a photo editing app to clean up some of the photos. If you are using adult movies, you will, for instance have to remove the web site logo on many of the pictures (but do remember to credit the site somewhere in the comic!).

You can easily remove objects in Photoshop.

Xing Xing uses Photoshop, which have various tools for "healing" and removal, including erasers, content aware fill, AI generative fill etc. 

You can easily remove people and objects from photos. If you lack a scene with two characters talking, you can copy one person into an image presenting the other actor.

Photoshop is expensive, but there are alternatives that can also be used with great success (including Affinity Photo, Photoshop Elements and Pixelmator,) and there are even cheaper alternatives with AI driven editing tools for removal of objects online.

Photo editing software can also be used to create the front page of the comic.

Comics editor

You can get good results with presentation software like Powerpoint or Keynote, but if you want that real comic book feeling, with appropriate borders, speech-bubbles and fonts, you will need a dedicated editor. 

The choice is easy, because there is only one: Comic Life.

At the core Comic Life lets you design comic pages with panels. They have presets for different types of comics, but if you want to use Comic Life for online publishing, including having them read on a phone, you'd better go as simple as possible, with normally no more than one or two panels per page. 

You can add headlines, text-boxes, speech-bubbles and stamps (like "KAPOW!)

You may also let Comic Life transform photos into drawings.

If you want high res PDFs, remember to set the image filter resolution to 300dpi, both when importing the images and exporting the completed comic as a PDF.

Remember that you can always reduce the resolution later.

A PDF shrinker

The PDFs produced by Comic Life are pretty big, especially if you add high res photos to the comic (which you should.)

You should therefore reduced the size of the PDF before you share it online. There are a lot of apps that can do this for you, including PDF Squeezer for Mac.

A place to store your comics

You will need a place in the cloud where you can store and share your comics. You might use Google Drive for this, but obviously only if you have set up an additional anonymous account.  There is always a risk that someone will report your Google files so that Google removes them or the account, so keep backups of the files.

We recommend Mega.nz for sharing PDF. They  provides a free option that is sufficient for this kind of distribution.

A place to publish your comics

To have full freedom it makes sense to put up your site on an adult-friendly site (if your comics are explicit), but that will obviously cost a lot.

We are using Blogger at the moment. They put up a lot of warning screens for explicit content, but - hey! - it is free.

If you want to embed the code on a web site, there are Wordpress plugins that can help you if you are using Wordpress. Some storage services will also provide you with the relevant HTML code.

Here's an example of embedding a Google Drive PDF file using iframe HTML code. You can get the code via the preview option on Google Drive.

So, that's it. Making your first erotic MTF photo comic requires a bit of preparation, but when you have done it once, making the next one is very easy.