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!
=s=
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