Archive for ‘Tech Thursday’

10 items.

Tech Thursday No. 10

December 4th, 2008 | by Scott Story

Over at www.typealyzer.com, I checked out Johnny Saturn to see what personality type this site belongs to. I find this sort of interesting, because I have to imagine that this tells us more about the personalities of Comicpress theme author (Tyler Martin), and Phil Hofer, who has done a lot of work on this site, both in what you see out front and on the backend.

ISTP – The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

On Website Outlook, at http://websiteoutlook.com/, I discover that johnnysaturn.com’s Estimated Worth $1708.2 USD. Interesting information, but I’m not in the selling market.

Over at Quantcast, we get an interesting picture of our readership. According to www.quantcast.com,

58% of our readers are male, 42% female
51% of our readers are aged 18 to 34, 15% are age 12 to 17, and 18% ate 35 to 49
87% of our readers are Caucasian, 6% Asian, 3% African American, and 3% Hispanic
74% of our readers have no children, and 26% have children aged 6 to 17
33% of our readers make less than 30K per year, 39% make 30K to 60K, 18% make 60K to 100K, and 11% make more than 100K per year
34% of our readers have no college, 55% have college degrees, and 11% have advanced degrees.
2% of the readers here are big fans, 37% are regulars, and 61% are passer-bys.
33% of the readers visit this site from work, and 67% visit from home.

I have to admit, I find all this information compelling. It doesn’t really change what I do, but it’s still neat to know.

Scott.

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Tech Thursday No 9

October 2nd, 2008 | by Scott Story

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!

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Tech Thursday No 8

September 25th, 2008 | by Scott Story

Hello, All!

Tech Thursday is back after its short hiatus. If you will remember the golden days of yore, we were last discussing the use of Photoshop to letter comics, and I explained how to create custom shapes to create all your balloons. Now it’s time to continue, and examine the tool presets that may be used to make Photoshop into a lean, mean, lettering machine!

First up, you’ll want to set up your font and the Lettering tool. I chose Mighty Zeo Caps, a free font from the incomparable Blambot, as our choice for Johnny Saturn. Choosing what point size to use can be tricky, because fonts aren’t uniform at different dimensions. We chose 7pts, because we letter Johnny Saturn at actual print size, and Mighty Zeo Caps at 7pts is about an eighth-of-an inch tall when printed, which is a more-or-less standard size.

We set all our options (under Windows, Options), as seen in the Options Bar near the top of the Photoshop screen, for the following settings: Mighty Zeo Caps, Regular, 7Pt, Crisp, Center Justified, and we set the font color at pure black.

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Having established our lettering parameters, it’s time to make this into a Tool Preset. If the preset window is not already open, go to Windows, and then check Tool Presets. In the Tool Presets menu, click the Save Preset icon, which is left of the Trash icon, and a dialogue box will appear. Name your preset something memorable, such as Comic Lettering, and select the OK button. Now, whenever you select the Text tool, and you want to letter a comic, go to the Tool Presets menu and pick Comics Lettering and you are good to go. If you change your comic parameters around, no problem-your lettering preset will return everything to your standard setup!

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You need to follow a similar process for all the custom lettering shapes you made. Select your custom shape menu with your balloons, and then fill out your Options Bar with the following: There are three box-shaped icons showing your choices for vector art, and you need to select the first of the three. There are five box icons that represent vector fill options, and you need to choose the first one. Under Style, choose the first option in the popup menu that appears, indicating no style. For color, choose pure white on the color picker that pops up.

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You are not done yet! On the Layer Menu, choose Layer Style, and then Stroke. In the Stroke menu, you want to set up the line to be 6 pixels wide, Outside position, Normal blend mode, 100% opacity, Color fill type, and choose pure black from the color picker.

Now it’s time to make this into a Tool Preset! Once you’ve brought up the Tool Presets dialogue, select Save Preset, Give it a name (I called mine Lettering Layer Style), and select OK. From now on, whenever it’s time to start laying out balloons and pointers, you are instantly ready to get to work!

You’ve got your font set up, your balloons ready to go, and it’s time to start laying in the text! You’ve taken the laborious task of making Photoshop into a good lettering application, and now it’s ready to letter when you are! Next time, bringing all this together!

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Tech Thursday No. 7

August 21st, 2008 | by Scott Story

Illustrator is the industry standard for lettering comics, and there are lots of good reasons for this.  Some letterers have been using Manga Studio, which I understand is well-suited for lettering as well.  Photoshop may be used to letter, but if you do then there are some ways to streamline the process, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in this next series of columns. 

 

Why would you letter in Photoshop?  Great question.  Maybe you don’t have time to learn a new application.  Maybe you already are comfortable with Photoshop.  Maybe you can’t afford Illustrator.  Maybe you don’t want to mess with one program for art, one for lettering, and one for compositing the image.  Whatever the reason, you can letter in Photoshop with ease, especially if you make the preparations I’m going to cover in this series of columns.

 

First, you need to make a Custom Shapes file of all your balloon and tail shapes.  Here’s what you do:

 

1)      Make your balloon shapes.  The shapes can be whatever you want, from the standard oval, to thought balloons, angry balloons, and queasy balloons— whatever you want. 

2)      Use the Magic Wand tool and select the balloon.

3)      Go to the Paths palette, which is usually grouped with Layers and Channels, and can be brought up in any case under the Window pull down.  Hit the Make Work Path From Selection icon, which is the fourth icon over on the bottom of the Paths palette.

4)      Go to the Edit pull down, select Define Custom Shape. Give your balloon a name in the popup box that appears, and then press OK.

 

To create your own custom shape file, and collect your custom balloons as you make them, here are the steps.

 

1)      Select Custom Shape from the main toolbar. 

2)      In the options bar at the top, there will be a Shape pull down with an arrow next to it.  Select the arrow, and display the custom shapes in that file.

3)      There is an arrow icon in the upper right hand corner of this pull down box. Select it.

4)      In the menu that pops up, select Preset Manager

5)      In the Preset Manager, select all the shapes that were already in the file, leaving only your new balloons intact.  Select Delete.  It’s OK to do this, because you are making a new file, not writing over an old file and destroying the existing custom shapes.

6)      Select Done.

7)      Go back to the shape pull down box, select the arrow icon in the upper right hand corner, and select Save Shapes.

8)       Name your new file appropriately.

9)      Now, whenever you wish, you can load your new lettering shapes!  Easy as that.

 

Well, that’s enough for this week.  There are some important tool presets that I’ll get into that can make your job much, much easier.  There’s also the question of font choice and size, and putting the whole thing together.

 

Scott.

 

Note: The reason that I create the balloons and tails separately is because this gives you much more flexibility on how you can arrange your balloons, especially if you are into lots of connected and overlapped balloons.

 

Note: At the end of this particular series, I’ll include all my presets and files for you to experiment with.

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Tech Thursday No. 6

August 14th, 2008 | by Scott Story

Hi, Folks:

 

In the last two columns, I have discussed how I collected and arranged my color swatches.  In this episode, I’m giving you my general palette to download.  You can study what I did, or use it as it, or do whatever you want with it. 

 

Download ACO File (Good for Photoshop)

Download ACO File (Good for other applications)

 

 

I mention that I’m putting up my ‘general’ palette, because I break my colors into two separate groups, the ‘general’ and the ‘specific’ ones.  The specific swatches are all my characters’ colors, primarily being their costumes and power effects, and as such are little to no use for anyone but me.  The general palette, on the other hand, is much more universal.

 

In the general palette, I include colors that get used again and again.  For example, I have eight base skin tones, and numerous colors for specialized use such as bruises, under skin veins, scar tissue, old tattoos, and the like.  Painting skin is a specialized skill, and I’ll cover that in detail in a future column.  For eyes, I include the actual color of the whites of eyes, the pink on the inner corner of the eyes, and eight eye colors.  For the mouth, I include two colors of teeth, gums, and lips.  I include seven common hair colors, as well.

 

Beyond the human hues, I include blood, water, camouflage, cityscape, grass, fire, fog, smoke, bricks, medieval hell and hell clouds, metals, latex, white cloth, bandages, and medieval demons.  (If you want, delete the colors for medieval hell and demons; I had a scene I needed those for.  I picked those specific colors from medieval religious illustrations.)

 

The colors in the palette are local colors, and don’t take into account lightning conditions.  A storm tossed sea’s water is going to be colored much differently than a calm sea on a bright, blue day.  As a loose guideline, remember that light in the morning and at sunset is red; noonday light is bright yellow; nighttime light is purple; fluorescent light is white, etc.  Seasons affect the color of light, too, allowing for gray winter days, muted autumnal colors, and other variations in saturation.  There many specialized situations with other colored light, and the effects on the colors can be haunting. 

 

There’s a great deal more I could tell you, such as warm light has cool shadows, and cool light has warm shadows.  Or, about reflective light.  Or about colors that ‘flatten out,’ or about the desaturation of shadows.  Coloring is fascinating, and your learning should never stop.  I consider myself a journeyman at this, and that’s fine, because I still find great joy in exploring color.

 

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Tech Thursday Episode 5

August 7th, 2008 | by Scott Story

 

Hi, Folks!

 

More fun with color swatches!  This week, I’m going to cover how to set up and manage your own custom color swatch palette.

 

To create your own custom palette of color swatches, open Window, then Swatches.  There will be a default color palette already loaded.  In the upper right hand corner of this swatch window there is a toggle button: select this, and then select Preset Manager from the menu that has popped up.  Within the preset manager, select all the colors, and then hit the Delete Key.  Select Done, and return to the Swatch Window.  Use the Eye Dropper tool to select at least one color, then, at the bottom of your new swatch, select the new swatch icon (it looks like a piece of paper with the corner folded over), and the color will be saved in your new swatch library.  

 

Next, go to the upper right hand corner of the swatch window, select the toggle button for the menu again, and select Save Swatches.  Give the new swatch palette a name, and when you hit enter it will be saved as an ACO file in Photoshop’s Color Swatches folder.  You don’t have to save your Palette every time you use it, but you should save it every time you add new colors or replace it with another swatch.  In this way, you can build a collection of color swatches to use again and again, taking the guessing out of the choosing colors.

 

It should be noted that I keep my color swatches in the Large List format, because I want the text label for the color to show.  Adding a text label to the colors is quite easy, because all you have to do is double click on the text that lies to the left of the color, and its label then can be edited.  Be sure to label the color in a manner that makes sense, such as “bruise,” or “eyes green,” or “utopian’s piping.”

 

By the time you have collected scores of colors, you will probably want to better organize your custom palette.  Inside the Preset manager, you can drag and drop the colors into convenient groupings, rearranging your list as you see fit.

 

Well, that’s enough for this week.  Next week I will post my custom color swatch palette for you to use, or at least use as an example, and well get in the specifics of what colors you should save.  See you then!

 

Scott!

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Tech Thursday Episode 4

July 31st, 2008 | by Scott Story

Hi, Folks!

 

Today, I’m discussing how I put together my color swatches in Photoshop.  Before I dig into that, though, I think it’s best if I explain why I went to the trouble to make these color palettes. 

 

Photoshop comes with a bunch of swatches, be they Pantone, or Trumatch, or what have you.  These are perfectly fine, depending what you use them for, and they offer interesting ranges of hues for you to use.  All well and good, I suppose.  But, what if you wanted to use a color again and again, such as the grey in the whites of eyes, or the color of your character’s cloak, or the candy apple red for a car you draw again and again?  Suddenly, a huge collection of colors to pick and choose from seems kind of useless.  It did to me, at any rate.  I didn’t want to search through my swatches again and again to find the exact hue I needed—I wanted to establish my palette and keep it!

 

I’ve never heard of anyone else doing exactly what I’m going to describe, and I’ve read lots of tutorials and probably all available books on computer coloring.  Maybe it’s a deficiency in me.  Maybe no one else cares enough to get it just ‘right.’  Whatever the case, I started to put together a custom swatch that I’ve used, added to, and updated as the years go on.  In it, I’ve got ranges of colors for everything on humans, as well as often used tones like metals, cityscapes, and materials I use often.  I’ve also got the costume color schemes of all my characters saved as well.

 

Before I go on, let me explain the concept of “local” color, a.k.a. “mother color.”  That’s the color of something in neutral light.  An orange, for example, has an orange hue, although in bright light, or colored light, or deep shadow, or reflected light, that orange’s hue can change to many other colors.  In neutral lighting, however, it’s simply orange.  That local color is what I put in my swatch, because I would rather control the lighting conditions later when I’m actually rendering the image.

 

When I began to build my custom swatch, I didn’t just randomly fish for colors that I thought seemed appropriate.  Instead, I went to the internet, found examples of what I was looking for, and used the eye dropper tool in Photoshop to sample that color.  It’s fine to use subjective, crazy color choices when you are making something up, like a monster’s scales, or a heroes’ mask, but when it comes to real world objects and their colors it is best find samples and pick the color accurately.

 

That cover’s my basic approach and my thinking about it.  Next week, I’ll explain how to set up a new swatch, save the colors, and organize them.  This is fascinating stuff, so I look forward to seeing you then.

 

Scott

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Tech Thursday, Episode 3

July 24th, 2008 | by Scott Story

Hi, Folks:

 

Today, I’m going to talk about scanning your line art into the computer.  If you are not a stickler for getting crisp, clean scans where the blacks are black and the whites are white, and all the details are saved, then you can skip this episode.  As you can probably deduce by my statements, I am indeed concerned in getting the best possible scan.  When you’ve inked your page, the inks are not going to be uniformly black (rather, they are usually a range of dark grays), and, if you have a dry-brushy style, like I do, then all sorts of details will tend to drop out. 

 

The prevailing wisdom on getting a good scan is this: Scan your art in bitmap or lineart mode, at twice the dpi that it will be printed in, and then convert the resulting scan to grayscale in Photoshop.  Use the pencil tool to white out dirt and image fragments, and the black pencil tool to fix mistakes in the ink.  Since the picture will probably be printed at 300 dpi, you should scan at 600 dpi and then reduce the resolution at a later stage.

 

I did this for years, and struggled for a result that worked for me.  Then, in “How To Make Webcomics,” in the Image Preparation chapter by Brad Guigar, I found another method for scanning.  It wasn’t long before I made modifications to this process to fit my own needs and workflow.  (So, if you don’t like my method, don’t blame Mr. Guigar!)

 

To begin with, I scan my pages at full size (11” x 17”) in Grayscale mode, at 600 dpi.  This gives me more raw data to work with than Bitmap would have.  Leaving the picture at full 11” x 17” size, I go to Image, Adjustments, and Levels.  In Levels, I turn the black arrow up about 100 points, the white arrow down about 100 points, and leave the gray arrow as is.  I’m not specific here, because each scan will be different, and you’ll need to play with Levels to find what works best for you.

 

Now, I go to Filter, Sharpen, and Unsharp Mask.  In my case, I usually turn the amount, radius and threshold to 500, 70, and 30.  By now, your scan should be getting very clean and sharp.

 

I go to Image, Adjust, and Threshold, and run this at 50%. 

 

Now, you are ready to reduce your image to working size, which will usually be 6.875” by 10.5 for full bleed, clean up any dirt with the pencil tool set to white at 100%, and fix any weak spots in the inking with the pencils at 100% black. 

 

There you have it!  If you follow these steps, then you should have exceptionally clear, clean inks made of true blacks with all the details intact!

 

Scott.

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Tech Thursday Episode 2

July 17th, 2008 | by Scott Story

Hi, Folks:

 

Well, I had hoped to present this episode as a pod cast, but I’m still on the steep and deep part of the learning curve with that, so maybe next week.  This week, I’m covering how I set up files in Photoshop.  First, however, I must state the obligatory caveat: This is the system I use, which may vary from other similar tutorials.  There are multiple ways to accomplish any task in Photoshop, and the methods I describe are simply my favored way of approaching them.

 

This assumes that you have scanned your page in at 600 dpi (aka ppi) and it was either scanned in whole on an oversized scanner or you’ve already combined two smaller scans into a larger picture.  Pages are typically drawn at 11” x 17”, so standard scanners will require that you scan the page in two halves and then ‘stitch’ it together.  I’ll cover this more in the future if anyone is interested in that process.  After being scanned, the page size is reduced to full bleed dimensions, 6.875” x 10.5” inches still at 600 dpi.

 

In any case, in the layers palette I arrange my page into two folders, the upper one called “Lettering” and the lower one called “Art.”  I’ll cover the lettering folder and its contents in a future Tech Thursday.

 

In the Art folder, there are various layers.  On top, if you have any color holds or special effects that cover the ink line work, there is a layer called “FX.”  FX can actually be multiple layers, or even a whole folder of individual FX layers, as needed.

 

Next down is the “Line Work” layer.  This is the inked image, and the layer is set to “Multiply” in the layer mode pull down menu at the top of the layer’s palette.  Multiply effectively makes the white of the line art invisible, and that allows the colors from the layer below to show through.

 

Next down is the “Color” layer.  If you wish, this can be broken down into several layers, perhaps, from top to bottom, a Highlights Layer, over a Shading Layer, over a Color Flats layer.  I tend to simply have a Color layer most of the time, finding that sufficient for my needs.

 

In the Channels menu, there will be four or five channels already there, depending on whether you choose to work in RGB or CMYK.  I’m not going to address the ongoing debate over working in RGB or CMYK: I will simply say that I work in RGB, and I’ve never yet had a gamut warning or printing mishap when converting RGB to CMYK for printing. 

 

Below the existing channels, you can create channels as needed.  These new channels, called Alpha Channels, can be reselected later as used as virtual friskets.  For example, if I were to select a color with my wand tool, I could save it as an Alpha Channel, and then any time I need to use that selection again I can simply go to my channels, select it, and use it again and again.

 

The first alpha channel you need to make is one of your flats.  Back in the layer’s palette, select the whole colors layer (or flats layer, if separate), then create a new channel.  Paste this into the flats, and all your shapes are preserved there for later use.

 

As you go, you may need to make numerous Alpha Channels.  This cost little in terms of memory, and they channels can be combined and modified on the fly.

 

There, in a nutshell, is how I set up comic pages for coloring in Photoshop.  While this system works well for me, I have no doubt that you will soon fine variations that suit your workflow better.  That’s fine, because Photoshop is extremely flexible, and every artist approaches his work differently.

 

Scott.

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Tech Thursday Episode 1

July 10th, 2008 | by Scott Story

 

Hi, Folks!

Witness the birth of Tech Thursday! On this day every week I plan to deal with some of the technical issues around cartooning. (Well, to be more exact, some of the technical issues around the way I cartoon, since I can’t speak for all cartoonists.) This won’t be the old “tool talk” variety of columns, where I discuss what type of brush, pencils, and paper I use—indeed, it will have more to do with pixels than pens! The computer has become more and more central to how I create comics, and that is what I aim to address.

First up, let me explain one thing: I rarely draw inside the computer. Instead, I still pencil and ink on Bristol board, and then scan that into the computer. Many people do draw inside the computer, keeping the whole process digital, and that’s fine. It’s not me, though. I enjoy drawing in the analog world, and I love to ink, so, while I could easily do those things digitally, I choose not to. I’ve done it several times, and I didn’t like it much. If you do everything digitally, great! You’ve simplified the production process and probably even sped things up quite a bit.

Anyway, while I don’t draw and ink much in the computer, I do all my colors, sound effects, special effects, and lettering there. Here’s an overview of my tools:

Software: Adobe Photoshop CS 3, Corel Painter IX, Illustrator 9, Sketchup 6, Inkscape, and Manga Studio 3.0. Photoshop is my production line workhorse, and I use it ten times as much as the other programs.

My hardware setup is pretty straightforward: A Dell custom computer, an Epson GT 15000 12 x 18 scanner, a Canon i9900 large output printer, and 8” x 10” Intuos 2 Wacom tablet, a Belkan n52te game controller, and an HP Super Multi DVD writer.

Much of what I cover will be Photoshop based, because I’ve developed my own approach to coloring, and I’ve custom made most my palettes, brushes, tool presets, shapes, and actions. No presets for me! Luckily, if are one of those rare folks who relies on something else than Photoshop, most of the information will still apply to you, because there is a similarity in most of these applications.

More next Thursday! Scott.

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