Halftone 2

Turn your photos into comic book pages and videos with Halftone 2, an App Store Best of 2013 winner and Editors’ Choice.

Halftone 2 makes it easy to create comic and scrap books with your images. Choose a page layout, apply photo filters, position captions, add speech and thought balloons, place some WHAMs, BAMs, and POWs, mix in a few sound effects, and share your creation as an image, multi-page document, or high-definition video. There’s no faster or more fun way to share your stories.

Halftone 2 runs on iPad 2 or later, iPhone 4s or later, and iPod touch (5th generation).

Visit our Halftone 2 page on Facebook or become an expert by watching our video tutorials.

With so many features, there’s almost no limit to your creative options:

Captions and Balloons

Over 30 unique caption and balloon styles, including speech bubbles, thought balloons, banners, scrolls, and more
A powerful 3D perspective feature lets you tilt your captions and balloons to make them even more exciting
Six professional comic-themed fonts are included, and you have access to all fonts on your device
Optional “auto caption” and “auto text” features automatically add and position captions for photos that are imported from Facebook and Flickr
Each caption or balloon can have its own unique background color or gradient
Fully configurable border color, width, and style
Optional drop shadows add depth with configurable color, opacity, blur, and location
For balloons with tails, the tip can be positioned with a touch-and-drag gesture
Balloon tails have a customizable size and curvature and have an “emanating” option to add a small burst shape to the tail
Custom fonts can be added by opening a TrueType (TTF) or OpenType (OTF) font in Halftone 2 (for example, by opening the font from an e-mail attachment)
Control over font color, size, line spacing, and alignment
Ability to add multiple colored outlines to text
An optional drop cap with configurable size, color, outline, and shadow
Captions and balloons are “humanized” so that each one is uniquely drawn (like a real artist)
Favorite caption and balloon styles can be saved for later use

Stamps

Over 80 professionally-designed graphical shapes like WHAM, BAM, and POW
Optional “Action Pack” in-app purchase adds over 50 more stamps designed by comic design company, Blambot
A custom stamp feature allows you to add your own images (with support for alpha channels)
A powerful 3D perspective feature lets you tilt your stamps to make them more dynamic
Optional drop shadows add depth with configurable color, opacity, blur, and location
Stencils allow stamps that are inside of a photo panel to mask the image

Photo Panels

Photos can be imported directly from your photo library, Facebook, and Flickr
Full control of the scale and rotation of each photo
A configurable Juicy Bits “Toon” filter turns your photos into comic-styled artwork
Comprehensive photo editing tools from Aviary that include automatic enhancements, filter effects, brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, redeye, whiten, blemish, and selective focus
Each panel can have its own unique background color or gradient
Fully configurable border color, width, and style
Ability to set the size of imported images to control project size and output quality
Photos are quickly swapped by touching-and-holding a photo, then dragging it to a different panel

Page Options

Choose from over 30 multi-photo page layouts
Each page can have its own background color, gradient, or paper texture (over 30 included textures)
An optional page blending mode simulates the way ink interacts with paper
Favorite page styles can be saved for later use
Each page can have its own margin size

Video

Video is exported at up to 720p high-definition and can be saved to the camera roll for later use or sent directly to Facebook, Dropbox, or other compatible apps (like iMovie)
50 licensed sound effects are included that can be assigned to each photo panel
A “Sound Pack” in-app purchase adds 50 sound effects, including growls, crashes, instruments, vehicles, background ambience, and more
Configure the order that the virtual video camera visits each photo on a page
Control over how much time the virtual camera hovers over a panel
Each panel has a customizable transition that controls the incoming speed and movement (easing curve) of the virtual camera
An optional soundtrack can be added by choosing a song from your music library
A unique “auto stretch” feature automatically shortens or lengthens the video to match the length of your soundtrack
Optional hover animation that slowly pushes-in to a photo panel
The background color of the video can be customized

Editing

A document library lets you create, save, copy, and work with multiple projects
Each document can contain many pages, giving you space to tell the whole story
Full support for undo and redo enables risk-free exploration
A unique radial menu (with optional help) shows options only when you need them
The zoomable editing workspace makes it easy to see a whole page or to focus on small details
Elements can be quickly moved and resized with simple touch-and-drag gestures
Captions, balloons, and stamps can be placed inside a photo panel to clip them at the panel’s edges
Elements can be positioned vertically (stacked) from front to back
A built-in guide introduces all of the basic concepts
Includes a link to an expanding list of helpful tutorial videos
Enable the snapping feature to quickly and accurately align elements on a page
Copy and paste support for all page elements
Ability to lock and unlock individual elements to prevent accidental edits
Localized for English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese

Output and Sharing

Output formats include image (JPG), PDF, CBZ, and video (MP4)
Output can be shared via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, Weibo, instant message (MMS), saved to the photo album, copied to the clipboard, sent to another app, and printed to AirPrint-enabled printers
All page elements are rendered as vectors for the highest quality output
Preview feature makes it easy to see a low quality version of your final image and video output before rendering it at higher quality
An experimental 3D anaglyph feature lets you put on red/cyan 3D glasses and view your output in three dimensions (yes, really)
Output a single page or all pages at once
Image and video output supports Low, Medium, and High quality
Optional halftone image processing with configurable dot size, opacity, and gain to give photos an authentic comic-styled look
Support for multiple 3D anaglyph blending methods: Dubois, grey, full color, half color, optimized, and red/blue

* The “Guitar Riff” sound effect was created by and licensed from davecarlock.com