Notes from the Field: Production III

Hey all, Shane here again. This time we take a look at ink coverage and understanding how to avoid some possible pitfalls.

If you haven't gotten The DC Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics by Mark Chiarello and Todd Klein I suggest you check it out. It's a great book and I wished I had taken a look at it before I started book one of THE OVERMAN. But since I did not and am a firm believer of not messing with the process once you've begun something in earnest, I have run into my own spat of troubles. In it you would have found a very sound way to color comics. Of course I learned a different way, that maybe some of you have tried.

Here are the very basics.

In Photoshop layers you can set your blackline to Normal, Dissolve etc. I set it to Multiply so the white is see-thru and I can color underneath. Seems reasonable for the most part but when you start compressing layers, the color underneath the linework will be far more dense. The mathematics behind multiply is basically the value of the color on top which is the blackline (the letter K in CMYK) times the color value underneath.

Let me try to explain what happens to me and why this is a problem specifically with my technique.

When I sandwich any colored layers below the blackline in the Layers panel all I should see is color...and no blackline. I'll select all the black on the blackline layer with the Wand Tool set to 3. I'll go back to my sandwiched color layer underneath. I'll goto Select>Modify>Contract by 2. I'll fill that with white on the color layer. Next I'll open the Channels box which will consists of a CMYK layer and 4 seperate layers for each color C, M,Y and K. Your color picker in your tool box should be set to default black and white. On the CYAN Layer I fill with 60% black, on the YELLOW layer 40% black, and on the MAGENTA layer 40% black. When that's done, I make sure my blackline layer is turned on in the Layers palette as well as any coloring effects (glows, lineholds, etc.) and then compress those, so the final image is at the top of the Layers palette.

This would constitute a finished color file. But hold on...grab the color picker and open up the Info Palette.

Check your black areas and you'll see the numbers are outrageously high. Go ahead add them up...they'll be around 340%. This will cause the ink to smear, the paper to stick and the pressmen to curse a bluestreak. In my case, since I have a textured painted look to my work, I can take my saved CMYK .TIFF of this colored page and convert it to RGB. Then I convert it back to CMYK. What's happening is the blackline dissappears in the RGB version and assimilates into the Red, Blue and Green. When you switch it back to CMYK, it has to create a black plate and grabs the darkest darks to create it. There's probably a more technical way to describe this, but in the end what it does is creates a file where the darkest ink coverage is 300% and not a bit more.

Okay...if you're not sleeping by now, then you must be getting something from this. Believe me, it'll pick up. In the weeks and months to come I'll talk about the process as I'm dealing with it on a daily basis, and I'll even go into areas of pre-production, presentation, pitching, collaboration and general industry experiences. So stay tuned, you might just find something in your size.

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Notes from the Field: Production II

Shane here with another installment from the trenches.
So I spent the weekend up-resing the first book of THE OVERMAN. What had happened was I had inked and colored a back-up story for Fear Agent #7 months earlier and when it finally printed, that's when the truth sank in.

300dpi is not a very good resolution to print at.

The fine linework was muddy and even with it printed on slicker stock it just barely held it's own. It was more painful to see the jagged anti-aliasing of the borders on some of the angled panels. Needless to say, I was in a rough spot. Talking with Allen over at Image helped. I asked him how bad off it'd be to upres the book to 400dpi, a more acceptable resolution. He said considering that the work had a "painted feel" it would probably be fine.

Since I'm not one to go halfway I wanted to make sure everything was as good as it could be. I didn't just upres the work and call it good. No, I went in with my 1200dpi linework, and resaved it out at 400 dpi, then overlaid new texture layers to make sure the "painterly look" wasn't going to fluffy and mottled. Those two items are the bulk of what you see. The color underneath is effected by the texture in such a way that it doesn't hurt the transition from shadow to light.

So I finally have my colored 400dpi file...and acceptable printing file. I still had a problem with my old files that I did with my new ones. I was getting ink coverage that was totaling over 300% in any given area. Any pressman will tell you that's too much ink. It'll smear and/or stick the pages together if you don't do something. In some cases the pressman will back off on all the inks, leaving the color much lighter than intended.

So now what: How do I track down what I'm doing wrong to get my ink coverage down?

Stay tuned...I swear this will get interesting even if you learn something along the way!

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Notes from the Field: Production I

Setting out to create a comic is never as easy as one might think, even after years of experience in the general art field. I'll be going over some of the technical issues behind the creative process that make this art form "special" on many levels. While their are many books that go over what you should do, I still feel like there is information that'll slip through the cracks.

So it goes with the first issue. While our goal is to finish all five books before we even solicit them, it means we have to put each and every issue to bed before moving onto the next one. The first issue I'm quite positive is usually the hardest.
The challenges I'm faced with are numerous. It's a 32 page book, and those who are not familiar with pagination (the front-to-back numbering of pages) sometimes find it a challenge to decipher. A 32 page comic actually includes in the page count the covers inside and out. Those count as four pages, and the rest of your story has to fit in 28. Trying to explain that to Scott was tough, as I'd get confused myself. He had to adjust the script numerous times accordingly. Here's a template that I made to help us layout the book and see it. Since we're both artists, this was quite valuable.

As boring and technical as this may be, understanding it helps free me up to be more creative.

The other part of the battle is the publishers printing and production methods. The best way to understand that is to go right to the source, the print production manager. Image is a staff-wise a small operation, but they handle a lot of books. So I decided to ask other creators the questions I had regarding, coloring resolution, output, and other small technical things. What I found is a bevy of different answers, and some similar ones. As far as final file outputs for color, 400 dpi was the lowest anyone should color their work. That's a big issue to me as I've colored the first issue at 300 dpi. I guess I had been under the wrong impression for some time. Better to find out now then get 5 issues down the road.

My biggest fear was: Am I going to have to recolor 28 pages?

In my next installment I'll go over what kind of hole I dug for myself, and how I got out...or am working on getting out.

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Welcome To The End Of The Future.

Although our official marketing campaign in support of The Overman hasn't been unleashed yet, we are slowly, quietly gearing up the website and bringing additional content online over the next few weeks and months. As such, this blog is the latest addition to the site, and while it operates as a 'stand alone' marketing tool for us, it also connects with www.theovermancomic.com, so I hope you'll take some time to jump over there.

Shane and I will be dropping in here from time to time. As the writer, I'll likely be here often enough so you'll start to get an idea of the long history behind The Overman, glimpses into it's earliest incarnations, and it's mind-numbing transformation over the last 18 years or so. There is much I plan to share with you, and I know that Shane has been chomping at the bit to start posting various pre-production sketches and other incredible examples of his work (although I know he doesn't want to reveal TOO much too soon).