Showing posts with label Paper to Pixel to Paper Again. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paper to Pixel to Paper Again. Show all posts

Saturday, 9 November 2019

Please Hold For Dave Sim November 2019 (Our one year anniversary!)

Hi, Everybody!

So, I faxed Dave questions, and the Astoria/Cerebus posts, and got back this:
So, The November 2019 (yep, we've been doing this for a year now,):
For Auction as soon as I mail it to Dave.

We begin with Dave's reading of John's Gospel 1-1 through 1-18, Dave explains why. And then we move to Steve Peters' questions:
Anyhoo, here's a couple questions for the next Please Hold For Dave Sim if you want them:

Dave- You recently speculated that people such as Lovecraft and Stephen King, who write about the infernal, do so with potentially harmful impact on their souls. Does it concern you that you've done a couple dozen comics depicting the infernal realm?

On a corollary note, should I be worried about making a magical Chinese dragon a central character of The Comicverse? This has been in the back of my mind since you wrote the Bone commentaries. You wrote that, in Christianity, "dragons are, CONCEPTUALLY, metaphorical distillations of the malign, devouring presence of paganism".


Part 2: Dave continues answering Steve:


Part 3: Dave answers MY question:
I wanna know what you think of Vark Wars (so we can plug the new issue). Favorite strip? Least favorite strip?
AND, Randy Gray's questions:
Do you guys want creamed honey or liquid? Comb in? Never mind, we'll send both. Just finished harvesting late summer so now we can send a proper thank you for the boxes of Cerebus you sent me.
Dave kinda gets the story wrong. I told him about how Randy's house got flooded.

He also asks: Here's an oddball question, probably someone here can answer it : was Connie Lingus ever identified? When was her first and last appearance in the letters page?

Margaret answered: Here are the issues with a letter by either Connie Lingus or just Connie, so I'm not sure if it is the same author or not (one might be able to tell by getting out the issues and reading the letters if one wants): 72, 73 (only 'Connie'), 74, 77, 86, 140, 151, 163 (only 'Connie') Her first letter is actually in 67, but only attributed to C. Lingus



Part 4: Okay, T.M.I. about Dave and Connie Lingus. Seriously, T!M!I!

Then Dan Nitzani asks:
It's always been a frustration that 51, 112/113, and 137/138 are excluded from the phonebooks. Please consider putting these into a square bound collection, basically cerebus 0 plus the world tour book. Perhaps throw in random covers/pinups/sketches to round it out
This has been asked before. This time Dave doesn't say "no":


So if you wanna be the new Sean, read Paper to Pixel to Paper series. More on this as it develops.

Dave teases what he's been doing on SODAR, and goes back to that fax from the top of this post.

Pablo Martinez asked on the faceybooks:
I finished the last few "Typings" of Dave Sim destroying Cerebus last month and I was wondering, was there any sign or commentary of Dave about what was originally going to be the conclusion of Cerebus before he retconned 70% of the lore introduced in Church and State?

He clarified:
Dave used "Typist" pejoratively to refer to Hemingway. I use that term to describe Going Home and Form & Void.

Mark Brett commented:
I can't remember Dave ever discussing his original themes in any detail, other than that they were part of his former feminist perspective.

I always thought it was significant that he'd made Cerebus a hermaphrodite, though. At the time, before the "Male Light / Female Void" essay, I thought we might see some kind of cosmic union of the sexes (at least on a symbolic level).
And, Raymond Mountford asks:
Does he have any copies of “Zootanpuss” #1 and Glamourpuss #13 lying around, and how much does he want for them? My Glamourpuss set shivers uncontrollably like a chihuahua without those two 😉






Part 7: More with Astoria and Cerebus and their marriage (my phone got another call around the six minute mark): 




Part 9: More Astoria, and then we bring it on home. (Also, Dave reveals something about Cerebus' first Ascension that I believe has been previously unrevealed):


Next Time: I'ma getting a pinch hitter... but remember to check back for Part 6!
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Tuesday, 6 March 2018

The New AMOC, and YOU!

Hi, Everybody!

Let's see, what do we have today...

"Sean Michael Robinson has passed on..."

Everyone here at A Moment of Cerebus offer our thoughts and prayers to Sean's family in this, their time of sorrow. Sean was a loving father, and husband. A dedicated artist and...

Hanh?

Whazat?

Oh, "Sean Michael Robinson has passed on... the duties of posting on Wednesdays to Benjamin Hobbs."

Sorry, my bad.

Anyway, as a welcome to Ben, I thought I'd show some work he did for me that I'll probably never use.

Back when I took this gig, Dave Sim suggested:
"In terms of "feeding the Daily Beast", a snake eating its tail is always going to be the best solution so I would suggest AMOC's own history: begin reprinting the AMOC posts from the beginning on the -- I think, safe •• assumption that no one remembers 1/10th of them and none of them with any specificity. Which means each post effectively fulfills both its "then mandate" -- here"s an interesting Moment from the History of CEREBUS -- as well as a binary "now mandate" •• here"s an interesting Moment from the History of AMOC. Particularly if TimW is willing to comment from time to time about whatever he remembers going on when he did that post."
Which gave me an idea for a "Best of AMOC" logo, but I needed to figure out what title to use: A Moment of Ourborous, or An Ourborous of Cerebus?

So I asked Sean Robinson to whip up something involving the old "Tim W's AMOC" logo.

And he passed it of to Ben:
Look at 'em! Aren't they a couple of beauties?

Next Time: Ben. It's Wednesday, so that means it's Ben...
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Wednesday, 28 February 2018

Paper to Pixel to Paper Again: the Last Installment? Working with Color Part 4

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A guide to creating the best looking line art in print in the new digital print world

Addendum E:
Working in Color, Part 4
Greetings!

This is the second addendum to Paper to Pixel to Paper Again, a series that explains (in an overly thorough manner) the how-to's of preparing line art for print.


And as always, if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments!

***

In the last three addena installments, we discussed various ways to scan and manipulate full-color artwork to wring as much detail as possible from the final product.

Which leaves us with really only two concerns.

What about digital color?

If you do color work digitally, none of the principles I've discussed so far are really fundamentally different, other than the fact that digital color is generally very... soft... compared to real-world media. Lots of gradation. Lots of transparency. Lots of, let's say it, blurry effect going on. And so a lot of the sharpening stuff we've discussed isn't as relevant to digital color.
Which isn't to say you shouldn't give it a shot! 

Especially if you save lots of process layers, or use lots of digital "dry media" or "natural media" style-brushes, sharpening can be effective in bringing out certain effects. 

Here's a poster I drew several years ago. This is probably the last thing I colored digitally without any traditional media involved. It's digital color (in Paint Tool Sai) over a drybrush drawing.


If you take a peek at the layers, you can see that I kept things fairly separated, including the texture layer on top that helps take away some of the digital unnatural smoothness.





It's not until I strip it down all the way to the bottom layer, the original drybrush drawing, that I see a place for some improvement here. The drybrush could really be sharpened up to give it some more of its natural texture in print. You can see it's looking fairly soft here.

Of course, since it's actually a separate layer... does it really have to be halftoned at all?

Hence our last topic.

If I work in color, does everything have to be half-toned?

And here's where things get really interesting again...

If you work with a layout program like Adobe Indesign, and you send your files to your printer as PDFs, you can keep your various layers separated, with one (line art layer) going straight to plate/print without halftoning, and another separate layer either full-color or grayscale, which will be halftoned!

In fact, it's a pretty easy process to do. If you want to, you can even do it with traditional media (though it involves a lightboard!)

First--why would you do such a thing?

Basically, as we discussed in early installments of this series, there are some real advantages to not half-toning line art. Mainly, you can get a degree of detail that's impossible with material that's been screened/half-toned. And you can avoid any moire that might result in halftoning material that's not intended to halftone (for instance, screen tone, etc).

Let's take a look at an example that has all of these issues and more. Benjamin Hobb's hilarious cover to THE UNDATEABLE CEREBUS, available for order from your local comic store right now!


To start this cover off, Benjamin created the line art layers, working layer by layer and building up the file. 

Notice that this cover has both mechanical tone that would cause moire if it were halftoned, and a heck of a lot of teeny tiny little lines.


Once he was done with the line art portion, he saved the multi-layered file, then flattened it all, reduced the resolution to 600 ppi, changed the color mode to RGB, and then started the color layer on top.

Working with each of the color layers in Multiply blending mode enables you to see the line art from underneath as you work. Once the color was done, he hid the line art layer, then flattened the remainder.

Here's what the image looks like with only the color layer.


Once you have the two flattened files (in our case, one 600 ppi RGB file and one 2400 ppi 1-bit line art file), you can combine them in Indesign. Just place both files in the same layout and voila, you're ready to export. Assuming you have your PDF export settings set correctly, both files will retain their original resolutions and both will be handled appropriately by the printer.

And here's the final result!


For the real deal, check your local comic store shelves the last Wednesday of May!

...

Okay, as I mentioned a month back, this will be my last post here for the foreseeable future. Although I'll still be restoring every Cerebus volume as they come up for reprint, I'm taking the next two months off from any production work to focus on some commissioned illustration work.

Speaking of which...if you're ever in need of illustration or design work, I'm always available at Livingtheline.com, or at seanmichaelrobinson at gmail dot com.

It's been a pleasure writing for you. Thanks for reading!


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Tuesday, 13 February 2018

Paper to Pixel To Paper Again Addendum D: Working in Color, Part 3

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16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29
A guide to creating the best looking line art in print in the new digital print world

Addendum D:
Working in Color, Part 3
Greetings!

This is the second addendum to Paper to Pixel to Paper Again, a series that explains (in an overly thorough manner) the how-to's of preparing line art for print.


And as always, if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments!

***

Are You Telling Me We're Going to Get Through an ENTIRE INSTALLMENT of This Series Without Mentioning Sharpening??!

Everything we've done so far has been intended to address the stages of the work we've already gone through. That is, the color adjustments and the 180 degree rotation are because of the limitations and the mechanism of the input/scanning stage. Now we're going to make a few adjustments based on the next steps instead.

First off, this is probably the third time that I've recommended it, but if you're interested in these topics, do yourself a favor and find a copy of the classic REAL WORLD Image Sharpening by Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe (plenty of $10 copies at a certain South-American-themed website.) Although I disagree with several of their conclusions, particularly regarding resolution and supposed importance of noise reduction, it's an invaluable resource for anyone working for color reproduction.

Using the language of REAL WORLD Image Sharpening, we're first going to do just a bit of "capture sharpening". That is, we'll do some very mild sharpening to counteract the inevitable softening effect that any optical capture system exhibits.

PERIODIC NEUROTIC REMINDER—If your source image has any iterative mechanical pattern, such as screen tone, or scans of previously-halftoned material, DO NOT DO THIS STEP. You'll need to address it in some other way before proceeding.



Here's an adjusted scan of an illustration of mine from last year. As I typically do, I scanned it at-size at 600 ppi RGB, then adjusted the Levels with the original in my hand, side by side with the monitor.

(In this case, I also "cheated" a bit on the figure, adjusting his skin tone separately from the rest of the image, as he had a rather lifeless pallor in the original).

So! Time for the "capture sharpening". Let's zoom in way too close.


Yeah, like I said, WAY too close. Click to see it at 100 percent.

You can see some of the (totally normal) softness in the scan. Those streaks of red are from a water color pencil. They should have a bit of grit to them.

Because there's not really any noise per se to bring up in a painting like this — no undesirable texture etc — we can get away with applying a healthy dose of sharpness, using the Unsharp Mask tool.



 And here's the result. Click it to enlarge and see the image at 100 percent of the scan size.
Okay! Having sharpened things up, we're now going to resize our image for our destination.

If you're placing this image in a layout that has more than one image or graphic additions, go ahead and place your image now, and shrink or enlarge at will within your graphics program, finding out the optimum size within the layout.

Once you know what it is, open your original again in Photoshop and hit Ctrl-I to bring the Image Resize menu up.



Click the dropdown boxes until you have the "Percent" value revealed. In my case, I'm going to shrink this to 60 percent of the original size. Enter that value in your Percent box. If you're reducing in size, select Bicubic as the method (In my experience, Bicubic Sharper can make things way too crispy). Lastly, if you're not already there, enter your target resolution. As mentioned before, if you're printing on coated paper, I'd recommend somewhere between 400 and 600 ppi. (You'll notice the Percentage value might change if you change your target resolution. It's just doing the math for you, what the actual pixel change will be, not just the dimensional change).

When you're ready, hit "Ok".

Now that we're actually in the resolution space of the final files, it's time for our final blast of sharpening. In the parlance of REAL WORLD Sharpening, this is our "output sharpening" phase.

If our first round was targeting the high frequency information (small details), this is a grosser layer, trying to prepare for the softening effect of the halftoning that the image will experience when it's printed. As such, you'd be wise to back off the Threshold somewhat so the sharpening is effecting less of your image, and raise the Radius a bit from the modest setting we had before.


Please note — if your finished document will be printed on a Xerox all-in-one at your local Office Depot or Fedex Office, those machines are set to automatically apply this kind of output sharpening to documents. So you can either skip this step or ask them to turn off the sharpening on their interface when printing! This stuff can look harsh and crispy if it's overdone.

It's my experience, however, that the reverse is usually true. People don't tend to apply enough because it can look a little odd on screen. But it's what you need to blast through that softening printing screen!
Here's a close up of a scan of one of Dave's paintings that was turned into a bonus print for one of the first Cerebus Archive Kickstarters. It's a pretty soft scan.


And here's the pretty crispy file I sent to the printer, with two stages of sharpening, as detailed below.


And here's an up-close scan of the final print, half-tone dots and all. Notice how the haloing and strange crispiness has disappeared in the print, eaten up by the inevitable softening of the printing process.


What's Next?

Save your optimally-sharpened and resized image and replace the scaled version in your layout program. Now it's time to output your layout to PDF!

(Seriously, get REAL WORLD Image Sharpening and read the whole thing. And for goodness sake's, don't let your sharpened copy be anything more than a COPY of the original file. Things are changing fast, and you don't want to be stuck with an unnecessarily crispified image at some point in the future!)

Next: Is That All You've Got, Seanny Dude?

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Tuesday, 6 February 2018

Paper to Pixel To Paper Again Addendum C: Working in Color, Part 2

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15
16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29
A guide to creating the best looking line art in print in the new digital print world

Addendum C:
Working in Color, Part 2
Greetings!

This is the second addendum to Paper to Pixel to Paper Again, a series that explains (in an overly thorough manner) the how-to's of preparing line art for print.


And as always, if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments!

***

 Monitor Calibration?

The best way to ensure that "what you see is what you get" boils down to two things—the quality of your monitor, and/or the calibration of that monitor.

Just as you used a target, with known measurable values, to profile your scanner, you can do the same for your monitor, using a wide variety of devices.


That being said, the more dough you're expending on a monitor, and the newer the technology, the more stable the color representation is, and the less helpful calibration is. How radically has the market changed in the last few years? The 4k monitor I use, the DellP2715Q, sits at a definite "prosumer" price range, but has unbelievable color reproduction and so-called "factory calibration". While monitor enthusiasts (otherwise known as tech-obsessed photographers) will still find many nits to pick, for my purposes, this monitor has been more than adequate without any additional calibration.

Oooh Oooh, is it Example Time??!


Above is a raw scan of a commissioned portrait I painted this holiday season. I scanned it in Vuescan, using my color-calibrated Epson 10000XL, but not paying any particular notice to the exposure, other than making sure I wasn't clipping (blowing out) the paper color or the dark areas.

Let's say (for the sake of this demonstration) that we'll be reproducing it at half the size of the original. Then I could safely scan it at 300 ppi RGB, knowing that I can change the size of it in Photoshop to half the size at 600 ppi without any actual scaling at all.

After the scan is complete I open it up in Photoshop and carefully compare the scan to the original. The first thing I notice is the muddiness of the scan. We need to adjust the exposure.

The paper I painted on is a little creamy, not blinding white, so I'm not going to knock out all of the color. I go to Layers -> New Adjustment Layer -> Levels to bring up a simple levels command.


The exposure problem is actually visible in the histogram. Do you see that empty spectrum to the right of the big peak? That's our unused dynamic range. There's literally nothing in that range of the color spectrum of the document. The big peak, however, is the paper color.

The right slider (the one that looks like a white upward arrow) is your White Point Control. Drag it to the left until the unpainted paper is starting to look the right hue. Then grab the Gamma Control (the center arrow that's gray) and gently move it around until the rest of the color balance is looking good.
Post Levels adjustment. Click to embiggen.

Above you'll see the result. However, upon closer examination, it seems I've got another problem. The raking light of the scanner has emphasized the rough watercolor paper texture in an unflattering way. 



Fortunately there's a way to fix that. 

I take my painting, and rotate it 180 degrees on the scan bed, so it's oriented the reverse of how it was previously. Now I'll scan a second time. 


Because of the rotation, the raking scanner light is now travelling a different path on the document, causing an entirely different set of shadows to be emphasized. We can use this to our advantage to eliminate both.

Copy the second scan and paste it into the original as a new layer. Then rotate it 180 degrees so the two layers are oriented the same direction. Then select both layers, and go to Edit -> Auto-Align Layers. This invaluable Photoshop function is capable of analyzing visual content and aligning based on that content. 

After PS has done its thing, take a minute to do a bit of manual adjustment of your own, using the Move tool (V) and the arrows to drive the upper layer around, periodically turning it on and off to check its alignment. Once you've got it in place, it's time for the Spooky Magic.

Select the top layer and change the Opacity to around 50 percent.

Magically, all of the paper texture will vanish, leaving only the things that the two scans have in common—the actual content.



The look can be so uncanny that sometimes it can be better to moderate it a bit, and back off the setting from 50 percent, which will gradually reinstate the paper texture.


The final scan! Click to embiggen.

Next: Sharpening! (You knew it was coming...)
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