Questions, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome. We read every message.

Requirements

CBZ Forge requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later. It is a universal app and runs on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs, but macOS 26 itself supports only a small number of Intel models—please check that your Mac can run macOS 26 before buying. The app is around 11 MB on disk.

Contact

Email: support@tentstudios.com

Please include:

The macOS version you’re running
The source format you were converting (PDF, CBZ, CBR, or a folder)
What you expected, and what happened instead
The verdict text from the detail pane, if the question is about a conversion

Please don’t send us comic files. We can almost always diagnose a problem from the verdict text and the reason lines in the detail pane. If we do need a sample, we’ll ask, and a single problem page is enough.

What CBZ Forge works on

CBZ Forge is a converter, and only a converter. It opens comic files already on your disk and writes a new archive—there is no store, no library, no browsing or search, and nothing is fetched. It has no network access at all.

Encrypted and password-protected files are refused, not cracked: CBZ Forge does not remove DRM. Your original files are never modified.

Installing

If you downloaded CBZ Forge directly rather than from the Mac App Store:

Open the downloaded disk image.
Drag CBZ Forge onto the Applications folder shown beside it.
Open it from Applications.

Run it from Applications, not from the disk image or Downloads—macOS App Translocation makes apps behave oddly when launched from either.

CBZ Forge is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and the notarization ticket is stapled to both the app and the disk image, so a first launch works even on a Mac with no network connection. If macOS ever objects, right-click the app and choose Open.

Common questions

A book finished with fewer lossless pages than I expected

That’s the app doing its job. Some pages genuinely cannot be extracted without being changed—the image uses CMYK print colors rather than RGB, the page is rotated, or it’s built from masks, painted overlays, or optional content layers. Those pages are rendered at their inherent DPI instead, and each one is listed in the detail pane with the specific reason.

A partial verdict like 24/26 lossless means 24 pages carry their original bytes and 2 were rendered. It does not mean the conversion failed.

CBZ Forge refused my file

By design, in these cases:

Password-protected PDFs and encrypted archives — CBZ Forge does not prompt for a password or attempt to decrypt anything.
Split or multi-volume archives — a partial recovery would be a partial comic presented as a whole one.
Malformed archives — refused rather than guessed at.

If your file is none of these and was still refused, please get in touch.

It skipped a book I asked it to convert

Books that have already been converted are recognized and skipped rather than silently redone. Remove the existing CBZ from the output location if you want it rebuilt.

Where did my converted files go?

Wherever the Output control in the toolbar points—either next to the source file, or a folder you chose. Because CBZ Forge is sandboxed, writing to a folder outside its own container requires you to grant access once through the system open panel. That grant is remembered, so you’re not asked again for the same folder.

The AI cleanup is taking a long time

Expect roughly 20 to 105 seconds per page, depending on the page and your Mac. That’s the nature of the work rather than a fault—it’s a real model running on your machine, not a filter.

Use Compare with AI… to judge a sample crop before committing a whole book. If the result isn’t clearly better on that crop, it won’t be better across 200 pages either. The feature earns its place on soft, over-compressed scans; on a clean, well-scanned page it mostly changes texture rather than improving it.

Is an AI-processed book still lossless?

No, and CBZ Forge won’t tell you otherwise. Processing rewrites pixels, so those books are labeled processed—in the queue row, in the detail pane, and to VoiceOver. Only pages whose original bytes were preserved are labeled lossless.

My existing comic metadata

If a comic already carries a ComicInfo.xml, CBZ Forge copies it across byte for byte and never parses or rewrites it, so nothing your tagger recorded is dropped or reordered. Comics without metadata get a clean, standard ComicInfo 2.0 written for them containing the page count and nothing invented.

Privacy

CBZ Forge collects nothing, because it cannot—the app ships without the network entitlement. See the full CBZ Forge Privacy Policy.

Acknowledgements

Third-party notices ship inside the app and are readable from Settings → General → Acknowledgements. CBZ Forge bundles libarchive (BSD-2-Clause) as a read-only RAR reader, and a Real-CUGAN Core ML model (MIT, © 2022 bilibili) for the optional on-device processing. Neither makes network requests.