Drawing and export

Drawing pages on the iPad so they land in Platemaker at the right size.

Canvas setup

Create the canvas at the canvas profile's absolute size — the full figure including margins, not the area you draw in. If you defined the profile in safe area mode, that is the "Absolute size" the dialog reports back to you.

Or skip that step: generate the template as a PSD (the default) and open it — it is the canvas, at the profile's size and resolution, with the template on its own layer. With a PNG template, import it into the canvas instead. Draw underneath it. The template shows where the margins begin, so you can see what will survive the crop.

→ Canvas profiles, Templates

The canvas and the profile must agree exactly. Platemaker matches pages by their pixel dimensions, so a canvas that is off by a few pixels will not match its profile.

A video walkthrough of the whole process, drawing app and Platemaker, is on the Comic production page.

Layers

There are no rules to follow here. In particular, you do not need to hide or delete the template layer before exporting — the template is empty inside the safe area, so even if you leave it in, the only part of it that exists sits in the margins, and the margins are cropped away at render time.

No naming scheme, no fixed layer order, nothing to remember.

Export settings

Setting	Value
Format	PNG
Colour profile	sRGB (IEC 61966-2-1)
Size	Must match the canvas profile exactly

Export each finished page to Google Drive as you go — there is no need to wait for the chapter to be complete.

File naming

Name files so they sort the way you want to read them — any alphanumeric convention works, and Platemaker's name sort is numeric-aware, so page2 still comes before page10.

This matters less than it looks. Whatever the filenames do, you can reorder pages by hand after importing them — see Projects.

Getting files to the desktop

The iPad integrates with cloud drives directly, so the simple route is to export straight into Google Drive from the drawing app's share sheet. With Google Drive for desktop running on the PC, the files appear within seconds.

If you would rather move a whole chapter at once, put the exports in one Drive folder, download that folder as a ZIP, and unpack it on the PC.

→ Google Drive setup

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See also: Comic production · Chapter checklist · Canvas profiles