How do I shot comics?
I'm starting to think how I'm going to work on my next Miss Dynamite webcomic. I know I want a mix of inked lineart from Flash and scanned pencil sketches, mostly for backgrounds. So let's say I do a pencil sketch for the entire page. I scan it and ink the appropriate parts in Flash. Keeping in mind I might want to print these pages someday, I export the inked lineart/flat colors in .Eps (Flash can't import bitmaps for shit at high resolution). I open the vectorial lineart in Photoshop, 600 Dpi, no anti-alias. I paste the scanned pencil sketch in a layer underneat, I do finishing touches and apply text with Photoshop.All of this works, but the thing that bugs me most is that (unless there's another way), for this to be printable, I need my grayscale scan of the pencil sketch used for the background to be at 600 Dpi. And a 600 Dpi grayscale file is fucking HUGE! I'll end up with 40mb .Psd files a piece. If all I had was the sketch, I could scan it at 300 Dpi, but a black and white lineart needs to be at 600 Dpi if you print it.
Maybe I'm making a fuss about nothing. My computer can take the heat. If I don't bother making the pages print ready, it's easy to figure all out. But I don't want to be stucked doing the same work again later just because I half-assed it earlier.
Any suggestions? I know how to do this, but I need to know if there's a better way.
posted by Sirkowski at 3:47 AM
7 Comments:
...and I said I wanted to do something less complicated... x_X
Reduce the number of greyscale colours to 256 (or something like 16 if possible) and save it as a PNG file. That reduce the "noise" of millions of different colours that need to be registered, and PNG compresses a lot if there are areas of the same colour.
I'll check that out.
It doesn't change anything.
Oh well, it's no big deal. Last night I found out how to export 600 Dpi files correctly with Flash (it seems to work as long as it's not bigger than 8.5x11). So all I'll have to do is paste my Flash linearts and graytones on the backgrounds sketches in Photoshop. The files will be big, but it won't be complicated.
I hope I understand you correctly; perhaps you could convert the pencil sketch to a vector graphic?
If you've got the full CS at your fingers, this can be done (almost) automatically in Illustrator using "Live Trace".
There shouldn't be too much quality degradation if it's just a B/W sketch. It'll be bigger than if you did it as a vector to begin with, but then, if vector was all you started with, what would be the point ;-).
Nah, that wouldn't work.
The files are going to be big, nothing to be done about it. If I lack space I'll just buy an external hard drive. With the economy, they'll probably sell them for 2$ pretty soon.
Shellder evolves into Cloister.
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