What’s new?

In April 2023, we embarked on the journey of building Dashtoon Studio with a vision to revolutionize the way comics are created. After several iterations and invaluable feedback from our community, we are delighted to announce a host of new features that empower creators to bring their stories to life with unparalleled control and creativity.

Introducing Story Mode

Every captivating comic begins with a compelling story. However, transforming a narrative into a comic format is far from simple. Dashtoon Studio's Story Mode makes it possible for storytellers and artists to seamlessly convert their stories into engaging comics.

When you input your story in the Story section, our AI identifies the characters within your narrative and maps each one to a character from our extensive library of consistent characters. This ensures that each character maintains a consistent appearance throughout the comic.

Dashtoon Studio's AI then adapts your story into a detailed, panel-by-panel screenplay. After that, it generates the comic images, complete with the mapped characters, bringing your story to life in a visually stunning comic. Every panel of the screenplay is editable. You can even add new panels using just text instructions.

The All-New Editor

Our improved Editor brings back the beloved infinite canvas, now with a cleaner interface that balances accessibility and functionality. Whether you're a newcomer or a seasoned artist familiar with digital painting software like Photoshop and Clip Studio, you'll find the interface intuitive. The tool bar on the left and settings on the right offer a familiar yet enhanced workspace.

Key Features

• Toolbar on Left: Easy access to essential tools.

• Preset Frame Sizes: Convenient Frame sizes in a variety of aspect ratios to fit your comic's layout.

• Simplified Image Generation Modes:
  • Text to Image: Convert text descriptions into images.
  • Storyboard to Comic: Transform storyboards - hand drawn or uploaded - into fully realized comic panels.
• Inpainting: Edit specific areas within an image, now with the option of preserving the original composition.
• Image to Image: Modify existing images.
• Edge to Comic: Turn edge-detected outlines into detailed comic art.

• New Upscalers:
  • Creative: Increase image size while also enhance it with artistic flair.
  • Non-Creative: Increase size while maintaining the original image’s integrity.

• Speech Bubbles:
  • New Bubble Shapes: Fresh designs for speech bubbles.
  • Flexible Bubble Tails: New curved tails with easy manipulation for.
  • Connecting Bubbles: Link multiple speech bubbles for cohesive dialogue flow.

With these new features, Dashtoon Studio combines an unprecedented control over AI with an uncompromising storyteller’s toolkit to produce comics at one-tenth the time and cost as compared to traditional methods. Our in-house comic production studio creates over 2,000 episodes a month, with one artist producing an entire episode in just one day.

AI That Empowers Artists

In the current landscape, the narrative surrounding generative AI within the artist community is often negative. Many view AI as soulless, a theft of their work, producing low-quality output, and taking artistic control away from the user. This perception, coupled with the idea that "anybody can be an artist without effort," undermines the years of training and hard work that actual artists invest in their craft. Another common fear is that AI image generation will completely replace comic artists. In our experience at Dashtoon Studio, these fears are unfounded.

What doesn't get enough attention—perhaps because it's not sensational enough—is how artists can leverage generative AI. By learning to manipulate AI, artists can produce high-quality works at astonishing speeds.

Most image generation AI tools today are good at creating individual images, similar to stock imagery. While these images may look impressive on their own, maintaining storytelling continuity between them is challenging. Typically, these services use a single text prompt as their primary input. However, generative AI for comics and storytelling requires so much more than just generating standalone images. There's a vast arsenal of tools available beyond a simple text prompt, enabling richer and more coherent narratives.

In comic storytelling, where every image is deliberate and conveys something specific, artists need a high degree of control. They need to manage composition tightly, pose characters accurately, and make specific changes like adjusting the color of a character's clothes. Character and style consistency in AI-generated images is crucial for crafting an engaging narrative. This level of precision cannot be achieved with just prompting; it requires a comprehensive toolkit to harness the AI effectively. That's why the fundamental philosophy behind Dashtoon Studio is that the AI always works for the artist, rather than against them. Comic artists and storytellers have complete control over how, when, where, and how much the system's AI affects the images.

At Dashtoon Studio, we include several techniques beyond text prompting to achieve this level of control. For instance, artists can draw storyboards to set up their scenes and use them as guidance for AI image generation. This helps control the composition. They can also command the AI to edit only specific parts of an image according to their rough drawing combined with a text prompt. Advanced object selection using segmentation AI allows artists to extract parts of an image as a layer. Additionally, we have included classic non-AI image manipulation features such as blend modes and control over hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast.

We Hire Great Artists

Possibly the greatest proof of this philosophy is the fact that Dashtoon employs a creative staff of over 300 artists, writers and producers at our in-house comic production studio. If AI image generation alone could make anybody a great comic creator, we would hire anybody off the street. But we don’t.

Dashtoon’s artist hiring process is rigorous and extremely competitive. Through our evaluation pipeline, we have trained numerous artists across India, but only a select few have ever been hired at Dashtoon Studio.

We have observed a significant difference in the quality of comics produced by an artist versus a non-artist using Dashtoon Studio. With both personas leveraging AI, the artist-produced comics are of a much higher quality and more enjoyable to read by a large margin. We are building the AI equivalent of a Lamborghini, but only an artist can truly drive it.

Dashtoon Studio is revolutionizing how comic artists can use generative AI, providing them with the tools and control they need to create compelling and high-quality comics. By empowering artists rather than replacing them, we are ensuring that the art of storytelling through comics continues to thrive in the age of AI.

Coming soon…

• Character creation
  • Create custom characters that the AI will learn and replicate in any pose, with any expression.
  • Create characters that work across several styles
  • Addition of humanoid and non-human characters.
• New art styles
  • A brand new menu of preset art styles that you can use for your comic
  • Enabling artists to train our AI on their signature style, giving them an even greater degree of control over their work
• Improved AI capabilities
  • Prompt adherence - how well the AI follows the instructions in your text prompt
  • Facial expression and eye gaze control
  • Image segmentation
• Improved Layer management

Try using the new Dashtoon Studio today!

If you are a published author, consider applying to our Author’s Program.

If you are a comic book artist, or have previously written content for online platforms, please apply to our Creator Program.