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Technical Stuff
In This Chapter
This is the basic process we recommend for the technical side of creating comics. You may find different ways of doing things as you become more familiar with what is required. All our descriptions are based around this basic process. When we refer to Photoshop, we mean any professional graphics program that is capable of CMYK color and Color Profile management. When we refer to InDesign, we mean any professional document layout program capable of embedding your high resolution graphics into a multi-page layout and exporting to PDF or other industry standard format for printing. « You may find different ways of doing things as you become more familiar with what is required. »
The basic technical process
The Drawing Area sits within the margins of the full page.
The following files are templates for comic pages, with all of our print settings and options already configured for you. These files are set up the way we do things. Be sure you know what page and margin sizes your printer or publisher are using! If you want to change any of these settings, see the note below on modifying these files. These files cover the Drawing Area only (the area inside the margins), and are designed to be embedded in to the finished page layout in InDesign or another publishing tool. Draw right to the edge of these templates and do not include margins! Those are added for you when you insert the finished comic pages in to the final layout. They are set to 600dpi, CMYK Colorspace, 8 bits per channel color and have a US Web Coated SWOP v2 Color Profile embedded.
[TBC] This section is incomplete. It will describe how to change the settings of the above templates to different DPI, Colour Profile, Size, etc. It will include screenshots of the settings windows from Photoshop, etc. If you need any help with this in the meantime, please contact us!
These are the most common file types and some notes on their proper use. « TIFFs are the best all-round file for size, quality and speed. »TIFFs are the best all-round file for size, quality and speed. If you use the LZW or ZIP compression option when saving, you can compress the file size down without losing any quality. They also let you keep layers if you choose that option, and will store a Color Profile. Never use JPEG compression in TIFFs as this will make you lose quality in your images (see JPEG file types below). « PSDs are the best file format to use if you are drawing in Photoshop. »PSDs are Adobe Photoshop's image format. They can store layers, Color Profiles and a whole bunch of other Photoshop-specific odds and ends. This is the best file format to use if you are drawing in Photoshop. PSDs are generally larger than most other file types, open a bit slower and offer no compression options. PSBs are another Adobe Photoshop image format designed to handle massive images. If you save an image that is too big for the PSD format, Photoshop will ask you to save it as a PSB. Otherwise they work exactly like PSD files. PNGs are a good format for web-only images. While they can store layer information and other things useful for print, they don't offer the same speed or compression as the TIFF format, which is similar in many ways. « The JPEG format always causes your images to lose quality when it is used. »The JPEG format always causes your images to lose quality when it is used. It is intended to compress image information down in the most effective way, which must sacrifice some image detail. JPEGs should only be used as a quick and small-size preview of larger high resolution files. You should always work off a high-res original using TIFF or PSD formats and just use JPEG copies to post online or mail as previews, etc. Even if you canot see any quality loss at the lower compression levels, you will always lose image data every time you save back to a JPEG. If you save a JPEG file enough times, the quailty loss will start to become noticable.
To ensure you have all the right Color settings for your images, make sure you use one of our Templates, which have all the correct settings chosen for you. « Always use 8 bits-per-channel. You will not notice any difference with drawn artwork if you go higher. »Always use 8 bits-per-channel for artwork. 16 bits-per-channel (or more) is only useful for super-pro photographers working with images captured by digital cameras. You will not notice any difference with drawn artwork (even if it's scanned). Going above 8 bits-per-channel will just make your file sizes and load/save times huge, with no visible benefit. To check or change the bits-per-channel of your image in Photoshop: Go to Image > Mode, and make sure 8 Bits/Channel is ticked. The Bits-per-channel is the amount of color information per pixel you want to save. 8 bits-per-channel saves enough color information for you to have around 16 million possible colors to choose from for each pixel. That should be more than enough for most artists! Do not mix up "8 bits-per-channel" and "8 bit color". 8 bit color refers to the old 256 color mode from the days of VGA monitors, when each pixel could be one of only 256 possible colors. Ick! It's unfortunate the terms sound so similar and this causes a lot of confusion. « Always use CMYK color space from the start for any image you expect to print. »Always use CMYK color space for any image you expect to print at any time in the future. Computer monitors and printers use different methods to mix and display colors. Monitors use RGB color, which mixes together three colors; Red, Green and Blue. Printers use CMYK color, which mixes 4 colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (known as "K"). If you start off coloring an image in RGB mode and convert it later, the conversion will ALWAYS look different to what you started out with. It is better to color using CMYK from the start, so the image doesn't change when you go to print it. The CMYK color pallete has a different feel to RGB, but you will get used to using it. It is worth the effort rather than having your image change in unpredictable ways when you go to print! To check or change the Color Space in Photoshop: Go to Image > Mode and make sure "CMYK" is ticked. « You must embed a color profile before coloring any image that is destined for print. It ensures the colors appear on your screen as close as possible to what they will appear on the final printed page. »You must embed a color profile before coloring any image that is destined for print. Color profiles are a way of embedding a kind of calibration information in to an image, so that the colors appear on your screen as close to what they will appear on the final printed page as possible. If you try to add the profile after coloring, it can change the colors of your image in subtle and annoying ways. You do not actually need a calibrated monitor or a calibration too for the Color Profile to help (and a Color Profile embedded in your image is still essential, in any case). However calibrating your monitor with a calibration tool will help get your monitor colors even closer to the final printed appearance. We recommend using the industry-standard "US Web Coated SWOP v2" profile by default. Most printers use this profile or can convert to their own profiles with very little change to your work. You should ask your printer or publisher which profile they use so you can choose exactly the right one, but using this default will keep you out of trouble. To check or embed a color profile in Photoshop: Go to Edit > Convert to Profile. The Source Space section lists the current profile. To change it, choose "US Web Coated SWOP v2" (or your desired profile) under Destination Space. Leave all other settings as default unless you have an existing image you are changing the profile on and you want to play around with the way it is converting the existing colors. There are some tricks to watch out for when dealing with colors and printing. Pure Black and Composite Black - When Black is not Black « It's actually normal to use Composite Black (the one made of a mix of C, M, Y and K) in artwork. However, you should use Pure Black (C0,M0,Y0,K100) when you have text over a white or very light background. »In the CMYK Colorspace, black can be made up in two ways. Either it can be made with a combination of all four of the color channels (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) or it can made purely from the Black channel (also known as the "K" channel). This means you could see something like C73,M74,Y70,K51 in your color chooser, or something like C0,M0,Y0,K100 and both would appear "black". A black made of a mix of C,M,Y and K is known as a "Composite Black" or "Process Black". A black made purely with the K channel is known simply as "Black", "True Black" or "Pure Black".
It's actually normal to use Composite Black (the mixed up one) in artwork. However you should use Pure Black (K100) when you have text over a white or very light background. This is to avoid any color separation around the edges of the text. Sometimes when the color layers are placed on the page by the printer, they are tiny fractions of an inch out of alignment. This problem is so tiny that it is not detectable on artwork, but when you have fine text over a white background (as with speech bubbles in comics!) it can cause a faint rainbow banding around the outside of the text. So, try to make sure all your text is set to C0,M0,Y0,K100 or "Pure Black". Too much ink! « A good general rule is to make sure no color you use adds up to more than 300% if you add the percentages listed next to each channel in the color chooser. » The multi-layer Composite Blacks can also cause problems on older printers or certain paper stock as too much ink gets layed down on one spot and causes smudging. This isn't so much a problem these days but it pays to use a Composite Black in your art that doesn't use too high a value in each channel. A good general rule is to make sure no color you use adds up to more than 300% if you add the percentages listed next to each channel in the color chooser.
« We recommend 600dpi for any artwork destined for print, if your computer can handle it. Anything down to 300dpi is fine if you need to go lower. » DPI (Dots Per Inch) is literally the number of dots or pixels in a straight line an inch long on the page. It's a measure of the quality and amount of detail an image file can hold at the printed size. We recommend 600dpi if your computer can handle it. Having the extra resolution makes it print just that bit more fine detail, helps a lot if size/proportion of the image has to be changed later (that happens a lot) or if you choose to use part or all of the page to blow up into posters or advertising later. The minimum DPI for print is 300dpi, if your computer runs too slow dealing with 600dpi images.
To check or change the DPI of your image in Photoshop: Go to Image > Image Size and look at what it says in the Resolution box. Be careful when changing resolution of images.
There are lot of important details about how things are sized and positioned in comic books. Page sizes, margins, page counts, etc can be a bit confusing at first. For a quick start, example files are already set up for you here at Templates and Example Files. 
A 16 page comic book with 4 page cover. Usually referred to as "16 pages", ignoring the 4 page cover in the count.
« Page 1 is always the first page on the right as you open up the comic book. The page count starts from this page. » If a comic book is said to have 16 pages, that means that inside there are 16 pages of comic. That's 16 individual pages just like you would draw them, one after the other, and each would have its own page number. Outside there is then the front cover, back cover, front inside cover and back inside cover. These 4 cover pages are usually NOT counted in the overall page count. After all, every single comic book has them. Often printers will avoid this confusion by saying "16 pages plus 4 page cover". So why am I being so specific explaining this? People get confused when they think pages might mean individual sheets of paper that are stapled together to make up the whole book. Entire sheets are folded over to make 4 pages after all. But it is very rare that a printer will refer to page count as meaning sheets of paper. Page 1 is always the first page on the right as you open up the comic book. The page count starts from this page. 
Spreads refer to pages side by side. The first and last internal pages appear alone on their own spreads.
The confusing part about spreads is that a 16 page comic book would have 9 spreads, not 8 like you might expect. This is because the first and last internal pages appear alone on their very own spreads. In the Indesign screenshot to the right, you will notice that the first page appears as a single sheet with nothing beside it. This is because the cover (the big single sheet that wraps around the outside of your whole comic book) and its inside facing pages are NOT counted when referring to internal page spreads. Normal pages have a margin around the outside, so that the drawing area is actually smaller than the printed page. This is usually done because the actual page cutting process can be a bit inaccurate. If you had images going to the edge of the page, and the cut was made just a hair-width past the edge of the image, you'd get a nasty white line showing at the edge of the page. For a quick start, example files for normal non-bleed pages are already set up for you here at Templates and Example Files. 
Normal internal pages have a margin around the edge, making the drawing area smaller than the actual printed page.
Bleed pages are the ones where the drawing goes right to the edge of the actual printed page and there is no inner margin. They are usually used for covers or for special internal pages. You must have an agreement with your printer to allow you to print internal pages as bleed pages. Your publisher or printer will give you the right sizes to be drawing to for any bleed pages. Bleed pages have an extra 0.125" or more of drawing area that extends past the actual page edge. This means that even if the cutting process is a little inaccurate, there is plenty of image past the cut line to cover any white page that would show through. Do not put anything important in the bleed area around the outside of the page. Just extend the background into it just like this example shows. 
Bleed pages require you to draw past the edge of the printed page. This allows for a thin strip around the outside that gets trimmed off during printing and binding, as shown here in the final step.
« You will need to ask your printer for the cover dimensions as they will change depending on the Page Count of your comic book. » Comic book covers are Bleed pages and are a single sheet of paper that wraps around the whole comic book. You will need to ask your printer for the cover dimensions as they will change depending on the Page Count of your comic book. The Page Count will change the thickness of the book, and therefor the thickness of the Spine. That will change the width of your cover sheet. The cover sheet is made of two Spreads. Remember that the outside spread appears "backwards" with the front cover side to the right. The inside cover is the right way around. If this is confusing, get a sheet of paper and fold it into a cover page shape and see how everything is arranged when you flatten it out again. 
The cover is a single sheet of paper that wraps around the outside of the comic book. It is made of two spreads. Remember that the outside spread appears "backwards" with the front cover side to the right.
Perfect Binding is when the pages are glued into a square edged spine that can be printed on, if it is wide enough.
Saddle Stitched is when the pages are stapled and then folded over, giving a rounded spine with staples showing through.
The way a comic book pages are bound together changes what type of Spine you get. Spines usually come in two types: Perfect Bind and Saddle Stitched. Remember that the type of spine and your book's Page Count will change the dimensions of your Cover. Perfect Bind is when the pages are glued into a square edged spine. This is the most professional looking binding method but it costs more than Saddle Stitch. If the spine is wide enough you can print text and graphics on this type of spine. It also allows the books to sit perfectly flat when packed in boxes so they store and travel better. Saddle Stitch is when the pages are stapled and then folded over, giving a rounded spine. This method is cheaper than Perfect Bind and is the most popular option for standard sized comic books. You cannot print on this type of spine. These spine diagrams are borrowed from http://www.reprographic.com/
« One good suggestion is to back up all your important files at least once a week by copying them to CD, or a seperate hard drive. » The huge disadvantage of digital media over traditional paper is how FRAGILE it is. Digital files can suddenly cease to exist in the blink of an eye, swallowing hours, days or weeks of work without warning and without mercy. The simple rules is: Back up your files regularly! Create a routine that you follow at a set time and day for backups. Doing it "now and then" is a sure way to forget to do it that one time something goes wrong with your hard drive, or you click Save instead of Save As... and you really wished you had stuck to your backup plan. One good suggestion is to back up all your important files at least once a week by copying them to CD, or a SEPERATE HARD DRIVE. Backing up files to the same drive does not protect you in the case of a drive failure. There is free software available that can run backups automatically for you. Another common cause of losing work is when Photoshop or other software crashes, it can corrupt your image file. It's a good idea to take a copy of that file (to the same hard drive is okay for this) every hour or so, or every time you finish a major update to your file. « Losing comic pages or even entire comics is something I have seen happen to artists dozens of times while helping to publish their work. But it's a totally avoidable tragedy if you backup your files. » This may all sound tedious but one day you'll be thankful you took the time. How would you like to start a page all over again when you were almost finished? How about a whole comic? It'd ruin the whole project for you. Losing comic pages or even entire comics is something I have seen happen to artists dozens of times while helping to publish their work. There is usually no way to recover the lost work and they have either had to start again on a page or give up on the entire project. But it's a totally avoidable tragedy. So please backup backup backup! |
