4 Coloring Part 3 - Anime-Style Coloring
A picture is worth a thousand words. That's the idea behind these visual tutorials. You can learn more about coloring so much more effectively by watching a colorist work rather than by reading a bunch of dry instructions. So, I've captured my entire Photoshop workspace as I worked and annotated it so you can see everything step-by-step. Cel-styled color is an excellent place to being learning about coloring. Composed of flat colors usually only two or three levels of shading which, when done...
5 Coloring Part 4 - Cuts-styled Coloring
Cuts-styled coloring is a little more complicated than anime color. Cuts refer to the narrow selections made with the lasso tool. These selections are then airbrushed and, when built up in layers, produce a very slick highlight. Cut-styled coloring is pretty popular you see it a lot in commerical comic coloring. Currently this style dominates the superhero genre and is probably the the style most synonimous with computer coloring. Understandably, there's a lot of interest in this style. Despite...
What is DPI? Picking the right resolution.
For those who don't know, the acronym DPI stands for dots per inch. Since all digital images are composed of pixels, DPI simply refers to the number of pixels which define one square inch of canvas. The higher the number of pixels, the more detailed the image can be. Most professional coloring work is done at around 400 DPI. This means that each and every inch of the image is made up of 400 pixels horizontally and 400 pixels vertically. An insufficient number of pixels will make your image...
Knockouts or "Holding a line in color" (aka Color Holds)
A knockout is an effect where you replace the normally black line in an image with another color. This can be a very handy effect. It can be used to show an object is transparent, glowing or just to give an image a softer feel. If you use it on characters they tend to look more like they were animated, which can sometimes be appropriate. I use it quite a bit for distant background objects to give them a sense of distance and atmospheric perspective. Knockouts are also an excellent technique for...
Resolution and Screen Tones
In our example you might have noticed we used a very high resolution. In fact, the small 2 inch pattern we made was about 4 megs. A full comic page done at a similar resolution could be as large as 70 megs There's a specific reason for this a high resolution is needed to prevent a moire pattern. Pixels are square. Dots aren't. Since Photoshop images are comprised of large numbers of square pixels, to render a small dot and make it reasonably round requires a fair number of pixels. Let's zoom in...
Screen Tones
One of the most frequently asked questions I get is How can I create Zip-A-Tone in Photoshop For those of you who are not familiar with Zip-A-Tone, it's the trademark name for a now defunct screen tone that came on transparent sheets. Even though Zip-A-Tone isn't manufactured anymore people still use its name to refer to a wide range of similar products. Zip, as it's commonly refered to by artists, is a clear adhesive sheet with a halftone on one side and a sticky, adhesive on the other. By...
Trapping
Printing is a four plate process, one plate for each for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, otherwise known as Key. Each color page has to be run under each of the plates, so registration becomes a big issue. If the paper shifts even a little, there will be gaps between the linework and the color. While you design something to look like it does on the left, misregistration at the printer may make the final version look like the example on the right. Your printer may ask you to trap your images....
Television Interlacing
Here's a cool effect which is a variant of the speedlines technique simulating the interlacing of a television screen. To start, create a new document ctrl N that is 4 pixels by 4 pixels at 72 DPI. Magnify the tiny document to 1600 so you can see it easily. With the Pencil tool B or shift B fill the top half of the image with black. It should look like this when you're done Next, we're going to capture this little tile as a pattern. Select All ctrl A and then edit gt define pattern . This...
Anti-aliasing, the secret menace of coloring!
Notice the blurred lines. This is antialiasing. Avoid this. Notice the blurred lines. This is antialiasing. Avoid this. Notice the sharp edge with no gray pixels. This is perfect Notice the sharp edge with no gray pixels. This is perfect Anti-aliasing refers to the gray pixels adjacent to sharp black lines. These gray pixels smooth rough edges, softening the line. Photoshop has a habit of assuming you want this effect. In low-resolution images it helps reduce the visual effect of jaggies....
Flattening Your Image
To flatten your image, simply open the floating layers palette windows gt layers and open the pull-down menu on the side. Choose Flatten Image. Your image should now only be one layer. It will now be possible to convert the image to CMYK for printing. image gt mode gt cmyk color . It is important to only send files to the printer which contain no layers because most printing software can't deal with them. With the layers gone, you can also save the file properly in several new formats,...
Speedlines
Speedlines are a graphic way to indicate motion. They're used a lot in Japanese comics, but they're starting to enter the visual vocabulary of comics everywhere. Speedlines look great, the only problem is rendering all those lines can take a lot of time. Here's a great technique for making them quickly in Photoshop. Create a new document ctrl N with the above settings. Note that the width is only 1 pixel, while the height is 10 inches. This is going to create a strange looking document, since...
Coloring in RGB or CMYK? The Great Controversy
You might have noticed all of the techniques I've outlined set up the images for being colored in RGB mode. However, for professional offset printing files must be in CMYK mode. In fact, many colorists prefer to color directly in CMYK mode. Do you convert the image to CMYK before or after coloring This is a hotly debated topic amongst colorists. RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue, for the three channels that all the colors are divided into. RGB is the native color mode of computers, allowing...
The Lasso Tool
The actual techniques behind coloring are relatively simple and easy to learn. Mastering them, however, will take practice. The primary tools used in coloring are the Lasso Tool L , the Airbrush B and the Fill command shift backspace delete . The Lasso Tool is a selection device, acting like digital frisket. Areas which are selected can be edited. Areas outside the selection won't be edited. The Lasso Tool works in several different ways. First and foremost is in freehand mode. Freehand mode...