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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