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Art of the Comic Book | David Marshall, Instructor

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Production

While your work is traditional ink-on-paper, print media is exclusively produced with digital tools. Photoshop has been the industry-standard tool to this end for more than 20 years.

Make Raw Scans

To get each page done in one pass, you'll need a tabloid flatbed scanner. Resolution paramaters:

  • 400 ppi
  • 100%
  • Grayscale

Save each page as a TIF with the naming convention of YOURNAME-STORYNAME-PAGENUMBER (example "davidmarshall-zipslastday-01.tif")

Budget approximately 5 minutes to scan each page. For instance, scanning 20 pages took me 90 minutes.

The files will most likely be too large for email. Therefore, a long-term cost-savings tool is a portable USB hard drive. This one, for instance, holds 320 Gigabytes for $110.00.

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Photoshop: Retouch

  1. Make duplicates of raw scans
  2. Scale to 60% at 400 ppi
  3. Trim and rotate
  4. Retouch up with "Image/Adjustments/Levels"
  5. Save each page as YOURNAME-STORYNAME-PAGENUMBER
  6. Print, compare to original. Adjust if necessary.

Photoshop: Format

  1. Copy scaled art, paste into "page-400ppi.psd"
  2. Convert from RGB to Grayscale
  3. Hide all other layers, Flatten image
  4. Save each page as YOURNAME-STORYNAME-PAGENUMBER

MassArt's Tabloid Scanner

Location: Tower T308 | Make/Model: Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL

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