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.

Comments

Typesetting Program

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

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.

I'm curious - why a typesetting program? Is that so you can print them easily later?

Re: Typesetting Program

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

I find it easier to letter my comics in a typesetting program thatn to use a graphics editor. I can just make a box, type in it, and move the box around to fit the picture. With graphics, I have to make the box first, and hope I can get the text to fit it, or worse, squeeze the graphic around to make it work.

Re: Typesetting Program

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I use a version of Fireworks to place my text, because it does just what you describe above - I type my text in on a top layer (one box for each bit of text; move resize it; then draw the graphics for the speech balloons and boxes. I found that FW was easier than Paint Shop Pro to do that in, and its export function produced smaller, sharper images (but I still colour everything using PSP).

Have you looked at Scribus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribus) then, to see if that would work just as well? Looks like it supports CMYK.

Re: Typesetting Program

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

That's just it, I don't WANT CMYK support. :) Just RGB.

Re: Typesetting Program

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

I hope I'm not annoying you with these suggestions, but the idea of using a Desktop Publisher to collate comics was something I've already done. Surely the ideal would be BOTH, wouldn't it? I mean, when I first read your post it seemed like one benefit of using such a program would be that you could then also use it to make printed copies of your comics.

When I did my final unit in my Bachelor's in Visual Arts I produced a photo comic - Hypergraphia #4 (Wrong Number (http://lauraseabrook.comicgenesis.com/d/20060714.html) comes from that) using a free version of Serif's Page Plus (http://www.serif.com/pageplus/pageplusx2/). That proved to be more annoying than a mistake - I should have used MS Publisher as all the uni computers had that - and it was hard labour to do so (no spell checker, and making adjustments was a pain). When I recreated a section as per above, I found it much easier to use Fireworks, which was geared for web page production anyway.

However, if colour is the issue, why don't you just take a screenshot of a "clean view" of the page (one with no selection markings or extra data showing) and use that? It'll already in in your screen resolution and be in RGB, won't it? 

There are other possibilities too. You could produce the speech balloons separate to the original artwork and use CSS/HTML to place them as graphics above the artwork. It tried doing this in the first web version of Wrong Number (http://hunter.apana.org.au/~gallae/QueerStuff/comics/issue4/WrongNumber/index.html) and Dreams (http://hunter.apana.org.au/~gallae/QueerStuff/comics/issue4/Dream/index.html). It doesn't quite work, but the text in each balloons is real - it can be selected and copied, and read directly by a screen reader if need be.

Just some more ideas.

Re: Typesetting Program

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

>I hope I'm not annoying you with these suggestions, but the idea of using a
>Desktop Publisher to collate comics was something I've already done. Surely
>the ideal would be BOTH, wouldn't it? I mean, when I first read your post
>it seemed like one benefit of using such a program would be that you could
>then also use it to make printed copies of your comics.

What I want is for my source files to remain in one colorspace -RGB- for as long as possible with no conversion at all. When I create the book, I will use the RGB masters to make a CMYK book.

I wouldn't take an PAL copy of an NTSC movie to make a new PAL tape. I'd use the NTSC original to make a fresh new PAL tape without any degredation in or further conversion in colors.

>However, if colour is the issue, why don't you just take a screenshot of
>a "clean view" of the page (one with no selection markings or extra data
>showing) and use that? It'll already in in your screen resolution and be in
>RGB, won't it?

My print comics are 3000x2100 ( you can see one here - http://www.dolari.org/awfw/images/csprintversion.gif ), my screen resolution is 1680x1050. Nice but doesn't do it all.

>There are other possibilities too. You could produce the speech balloons
>separate to the original artwork and use CSS/HTML to place them as graphics
>above the artwork. It tried doing this in the first web version of Wrong
>Number and Dreams. It doesn't quite work, but the text in each balloons is
>real - it can be selected and copied, and read directly by a screen reader
>if need be.

No thanks. I shouldn't have to learn programming languages to make a cartoon.