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Layers and Channels and Curves - Oh, My!
by Dick Rogers
April 2, 2005
It was a dark but pleasant night in The City That Winter Forgot,
when Cartoonists Northwest met at the School of Visual Concepts for what may
have been its last Friday evening meeting. Guest speaker Georgia Ball put
on an informative and enjoyable Photoshop primer.
Using Scooter and Ferret as examples, Georgia explained she scans the
original art hubby Scott produces at 300dpi in grayscale. She does this
primarily to eliminate the blue pencil Scott uses, because if she scanned in
colors the blue would be a stand alone color but in grays it's just a shade
she can eliminate easily.
The original art is larger than the limits of her flatbed scanner, so she
scans each daily comic strip in two pieces (each gets its own layer in
PhotoShop). She lays out guide lines to help her align the parts and makes
one layer partially transparent to help her align art elements, then rotates
or distorts to get it all straight to her guides. Finally she flattens the
separate layers.
Georgia uses levels to adjust some things, helping remove stray pencil
lines or roughed in lettering which she will typeset later on. She likes
the free comic style fonts to be found at Blambot.com, in particular the
Anime Ace font. Georgia always centers text in word balloons.
Then she uses color range to delete the white, leaving black linework on
a transparent background. This makes coloring simpler and is less work than
selecting white areas one by one. An elegant, global method. Next she adds
a white background layer.
Now she adds crisp borders on the comic strip, eliminating Scott's
hand-drawn borders. She does this with the rectangle marquee tool. "If I
need to make lines ... I never, ever use the PhotoShop line tool," says
Georgia. She can draw the shape she needs and fill it with black, or swipe
a border from a previous comic strip and adapt it to the new one.
"After I get my (200dpi) print version ready, I save another version for
the web (72dpi)." She also reduces the image size and doesn't get any ugly
rasterization because she started with a high-quality image file. Her web
dimensions are 700 pixels long by 246 pixels tall.
Finally, she adds the title (she left room for that with the 246 pixel
height) and it's ready for uploading to the website!
Georgia colors her strips on a layer between the black linework and the
white background. This keeps the color behind the linework, maintaining
crispness in the linework, reduces the chances of spoiling the linework by
mistake. She colors in RGB, doesn't merge the layers and final output is a
JPEG in 32 colors mode to keep her files small.
Georgia showed how she uses the actions palette on work she does over and
over in every strip. For example she uses Actions for how she takes an area
of color and expands it to go partially behind the black linework to avoid
white showthrough. She uses paint behind so she doesn't paint over
something she's already done.
Finally, Georgia showed us examples of the photo retouching work she
does. She put a modern face into a historic photograph. Using mode color
for the brush, sampling skin colors and textures, understanding the
qualities of old photography, all allows her to make changes to old photos
that are almost impossible to spot without knowing something was done.
contact: Dick Rogers
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