Help center on Doodle Dragon Studio

Getting started with Doodle Dragon Studio

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What this app is for

Doodle Dragon Studio turns things your family already made — drawings, photos, half-remembered stories — into finished illustrated books. A parent or caregiver drives it. Children draw, tell the story, and watch it come together.

It is not a toy that a child is handed to use alone, and it is not a machine that invents pictures of imaginary children. The pictures start as yours.

Create your first project

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How long this takes

About twenty-five minutes for a six-page book if the pictures already exist. Most of that is writing and rearranging, which is the enjoyable part.

A suggestion about scope

First books get abandoned when they are too ambitious. Six pages, one afternoon, one export. Print it, read it at bedtime, and see whether anyone asks for another one. That tells you far more than a thirty-page epic you never finish.

Export a PDF or a video

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What ends up in the video

On Android, underneath the visual track, the app mixes:

each page video’s own sound, at that page’s position on the timeline;
each page’s narration, clipped to that page’s duration;
your story music, looped across the whole thing.

If you turned on Lower music under narration, the music drops so the voice stays clear.

Audio mixing is Android-only for now Full audio mixing in video export currently ships on Android. On other platforms the video exports without the mixed audio layers. PDF export is identical everywhere. This is a known gap and it is on the roadmap.

Printing at home

The current portrait PDF works well for reading on a device and can be printed at home with your PDF viewer’s fit-to-page option. It is not a commercial-print file: there is no selectable paper size, crop marks, or bleed.

Turn a sketch into an illustration

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Why the result should still look like their drawing

The point of this feature is not to replace a child’s drawing with something slicker. It is to show them their idea rendered beautifully — the same wonky house, the same purple dog, but painted.

If a result comes back looking like generic stock art with none of the original character, the description is usually too vague. Add the specifics back in.

Turn a photo into an illustration

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When to illustrate and when not to

An illustrated version is lovely for a storybook where the whole thing is drawn. For a travelogue or a family keepsake, real photographs are often the better choice — they are the actual memory, and no illustration improves on that.

A nice middle path the app supports: keep the photograph on the page, and make an illustrated alternate for the cover.

Photos of real people Import only photos you have the right to use, with the consent of the people in them. The app does not do face recognition, does not build biometric templates, does not infer relationships, and never publishes anything. See how your data is used with AI.

What about faces?

Generated illustrations do not reliably reproduce a specific person’s face, and we do not offer a feature that tries to. If the likeness matters, use the photograph.

Write a better prompt

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Why this matters more than anything else

Every credit you spend goes through that text field. Two minutes spent improving the description will save you three rerolls, which is three credits, which is most of a day’s allowance. This is the highest-value skill in the app.

The four things worth naming

Subject. What is actually in the picture, concretely. Not “an animal” — “a small round hedgehog wearing a blue scarf”.

Edit photos on your device

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Controls not in the current editor

Crop, rotate, straighten, video trimming and playback speed, and audio trimming and fades are not available yet. For page videos you can include or mute their sound and set the volume. For narration and story music you can preview, replace, remove, and set levels; see narration and music.

None of this costs anything

No credits, no subscription, no account, no network. If you are offline, the editor works exactly the same. This is deliberate — basic editing is a normal phone operation and we do not think it should be behind a paywall.

Plan a book with AI

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Treat it as a first draft, not an answer

The generated story exists so you are not staring at a blank page. It will get the shape roughly right and the voice roughly wrong, because it does not know your family. That is fine — editing text is free and unlimited.

The books people love are the ones where a parent rewrote the words. The draft just gets you to the rewriting stage faster.

Edit, reorder, and lay out pages

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Project Trash and page deletion are different

Deleted whole projects go to Projects → Trash and can be restored. Deleted pages do not go there. The confirmation dialog tells you that their media will remain in Library so it can be attached again to a new page.

Attaching video

A page can hold a video clip instead of a still. The app caches the first frame as a preview so the page card still shows something sensible. Playing the video on a page card is a separate tap from selecting the page, so you will not start a video by accident while reordering.

Add narration and music

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A word about which narration to use

Generated narration is convenient and it sounds fine. But for a book your child will still have in twenty years, your own voice is worth the extra ten minutes. The technology is not the point of the object.

Use generated narration for a language you do not speak, for a long book you are short of time on, or when you want a different character voice.

Create a short AI video clip

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Use video sparingly

A picture book does not need every page to move. One or two animated pages in a ten-page book is striking; ten animated pages is exhausting to watch and expensive to make.

Video is by far the most expensive thing in the app, which reflects what it genuinely costs to produce. We show you the price before every single generation rather than letting you discover it afterwards.

Manage your Studio Plus subscription

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Where billing actually happens

Apple and Google handle all payment, renewal, refunds, and cancellation. We never see your card details. Prices shown in the app come from your store, in your currency, including your local taxes.

This also means: cancellation happens in your app store, not in our app. There is no way for us to cancel a subscription on your behalf, and any app that claims otherwise is fibbing.

Understanding your credits

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What a credit is

A credit measures AI creation use. It is not money, it has no cash value, and it cannot be redeemed, transferred, or withdrawn. It exists so that expensive operations cost more than cheap ones, in units you can see before you commit.

What things cost

Action	Cost
Prepare a suggested description	Free (rate limited)
Generate or restyle one illustration	1 credit
Generate a story or travelogue draft	1 credit
Generate narration for a page	2 credits
Economy video — 4 / 6 / 8 seconds	1 / 2 / 2 credits
Balanced video — 4 / 6 / 8 seconds	2 / 3 / 4 credits
Cinematic video — 4 / 6 / 8 seconds	8 / 12 / 16 credits

The exact charge is always shown on the button before you press it.

Back up and move your projects

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Choose the backup that fits

Local-first does not have to mean one copy Projects are edited on your device. Studio Plus can optionally keep a private cloud backup, while .ddstory export gives every user a portable copy they control. Use both for projects you would be upset to lose.

Use Studio Plus cloud backup

Sign in to the same parent account on each device.
Open Account → Cloud backup & device sync.
Choose Back up now, or opt in to automatic backup.
On another device, open the same screen and choose Restore.

If both devices changed the same project, the app asks whether to use the cloud copy or keep the device copy. It does not silently replace either one. Cloud backup includes referenced image, video, and audio files and is separate from AI generation.

Delete your projects, data, or account

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The three different things people mean by “delete”

“Remove this book.” Delete the project. Everything else stays.

“Get my stuff off this phone.” Clear the app’s storage in device settings or uninstall it. Your cloud account and store subscription are separate.

“I want out entirely.” Delete your account. See account deletion — it has the full detail, including what happens to your subscription.

Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription Subscriptions live with Apple or Google, not with us. Cancel through your app store before deleting your account, or you may keep being billed for a service you can no longer sign in to. See manage your subscription.

Export first

Deletion is permanent. If there is any chance you will want a book later, export a .ddstory archive and a PDF before you delete anything. See back up and move your projects.