Johnny Saturn

Hi, Folks!

We are approaching the end of our Photoshop Lettering tutorial, and if you have stuck with me this far then you have probably come to see Photoshop as a viable and relatively flexible lettering tool. There a few things to remember before you begin lettering.

Letter at a high resolution. Your comic pages will probably be published at 72 dpi on the web, or 300 dpi on paper, but it’s best to do your actual lettering at a higher resolution. Why, you ask? The letters are vector based, aren’t they, and thus perfectly crisp at any resolution? Yes, they are, but at some point you are going to flatten your image and what was once vector becomes rasterized art. The higher the resolution, the clearer the final product will be; the lower the resolution, the more “jaggy” the art will appear. I work with all my original art at 600 dpi. For print, I downsize it to 300 dpi, 150 dpi for PDF documents, and 72 dpi for the web.

Before I start lettering, I collect all my art layers into a folder and lock the folder. On the Layer Palette, the Folder icon is the fourth one from the left, and third one from the right, and it looks like an old manila folder. Select it, and it will create a menu among the layers above. Putting layers into it is as easy as dragging and dropping individual layers into the new folder. Double click on the new folder, and you can type in a name (I call mine “Art.” Terribly original, I know.) To lock the art folder, and all its layers, refer to the “Lock” icons near the top of the Layer’s Palette, and choose the fourth icon which appears as a lock. Now, you can letter away without accidentally damaging your art.

As you begin to type in your letters, each new block of letters will create a new vector layer, giving you maximum flexibility to rearrange text later. Type in your text, and then select another tool of your choice between text. Each time you come back to the Lettering tool, it will create a new layer.

Now that you’ve typed and arranged all your text and dialogue to your satisfaction, it’s time put balloons underneath. Before you do this, though, I suggest creating another folder, labeling it “Letters” or some such, and pulling all your lettering layers into it. Do not rasterize your text yet; in fact, keep a copy of this file where you never collapse and rasterize the text! It makes it easier when it’s time to come back and make edits! All you have to do is select the layer with the text you want to change with the Lettering tool, and you can easily make changes or corrections! Lock this layer.

If I haven’t stressed this before, let me also add that you should save your file as you work on it regularly and often. This should be obvious, but, if you don’t do it, then it will eventually become painfully obvious. Computers crash. We should all be very aware of this by now.

Next week, balloons and pointers!