AWFW and CS for 707.16

[dolari]

Originally published at AWFW and CS Production Blog. You can comment here or there.

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The comics have been really really really late lately because of a problem I’m having with color shifting in CS. It came to a head a few weeks ago with the snapping fingers episode of AWFW. When I do comics, I use a typesetting program to get it all working. When I first started, I used Pagemaker, which allowed me to make up a comic perfectly. I upgraded to Quark Xpress, and that’s where the problem first started. RGB color is “projected light.” The light you use for a monitor. CMYK color is “reflected light.” The light you see coming from a magazine or other printed matter. The color schemes are very different, and any RGB colors would get converted to CMYK color, which changes the colors very subtly. Sometimes not so subtly. But in Quark you simply told it STOP USING CMYK AND USE RGB, DAMMIT. I’ve moved to Adobe inDesign, which seems to be insisting that it was going to convert to CMYK period. The first problems popped up during the Super High Impact episodes. If you watch Carrie, her skin tone gets greener and greener and grayer. The problem was, I was using a RGB color which would get retranslated to a CMYK color. I’d end up using that CMYK value as the RGB color for the next episode, which would get translated to yet ANOTHER CMYK, eventually greening her tint. After some serious fiddling and poking and prodding over the weeks, I thought I had it, until the snapping fingers episode where Andrea’s blue magic refused to save as blue, but was saving as purple. Even turning off the color conversion engine was STILL causing colors to mutate. Last week, I finally gave up, and now only use the typesetting program for just that, typesetting. I insert the pictures in Paint Shop Pro, where no color conversion ever happens and everything works just fine. Which is great considering there are about 1000 colors in Carrie’s face alone this week that could have gone horribly horribly wrong.

People wanted to see Carrie’s full outfit…I tried to oblige, but the episode just didn’t call for it. So use the previous episode, Panel 1 of this week’s episode and your imaginations for the rest of the horror.