Looking for a critique

William G · Post by **William G** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 2:07 pm

http://www.thepersonunderthestairs.com/ ... /herc1.png

It's just one page, but its for my Modern Tales tryout (I got the royal invite to try a couple of weeks ago). I need to know if there's any legibility/ loading/ and various other issues that mark me as the hack I am.

Thanks.

Post by **Greg Stephens** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 2:47 pm

I don't see any techincal or presentional issues. Looks fairly non-hack to me.

kaos_de_moria · Post by **kaos_de_moria** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 6:48 pm

on an issue you didn't ask about. i have the impression you reduced the colour quality too much. i am running a quiet good resolution on my LCD and the sword or the boys arm in the first panel still appear edgy. my photoshop insists, that it is reduced to 256 grey scales. but checking the colour table that must be wrong. i'd guess it is rather in the 16 colour range. ok, i'm talking too much. i think this has a rather bad effect on the art. i'd recommend you too work with better quality. i think the influence on loading times would not be too bad. if i am wrong on the PNG colour reduction issue, you might have to check you scanner. if it is done directly at the computer there might be an issue with the reduction in size. (if they were not done in original size)

good luck with the project,
kaos

Eric F Myers · Post by **Eric F Myers** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 7:58 pm

Looks good. If you get in I guess I'll have to cancel my Netflix subscription and subscribe to Modern Tales.

William G · Post by **William G** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 12:04 am

thanks guys

Kaos: I scanned it as lineart at 300dpi. Converted to greyscale after cleaning it up, added the tones, reduced it to it's present size and added the text. I used photoshop's "Save for web" option to .png it.

It should be at 256 "colors", but I can see what you mean. Anyone have any thoughts on this they'd care to share?

kaos_de_moria · Post by **kaos_de_moria** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 6:54 am

possibility 1) what format did you use to save the steps in between? depending on the program (and i never used p2web) if you save earlier steps in PNG already you loose colour quality while reducing the size of the picture. best would be to use tiff until the final step, where you make it web ready and save it as PNG.

possibility 2) with all the "user-friendlyness" of adobes save dialogue windows there might be some "drawer" (don't know how you call that UI element in english) where you specify quality in steps like bad-medium-good-very good (as in saving as JPG). depending on that it might reduce the grey scales.

possibility 3) photoshop to web is crap (i don't know)

(...)

point is, if you open the picture in photoshop, change to RGB, change back to specified colours 16 grey scales, you will have the same picture. there is no change of quality.

kaos

losttoy · Post by **losttoy** » Fri Aug 27, 2004 1:47 am

I don't like PNG's, so I don't use them. So I downloaded your file and opened it in Photoshop and then went to "save to web". I used the GIF as a file format, greyscale instead of web or any other indexed color, with no dither. Then I used the web snap at 100 and had 6 shades of grey. I took a file from 92k to 36k while keeping the same image quality. (Sometimes I save at 66% web snap and 9 colors to get some of the greys right, but this situation worked fine).

As for WHY you are using grey scale instead of color is beyond me. I know to feel and style of certian comic to go grey scale is important to the tone. I am not sure if this is the case. My personal opinion is that this Herc comic should be in color, even if it is just faded brown. I get a feel that it should use the two tone color effect that is used in Japanese comics; not full color but shades of red, shades blue and when mixed together shades of purple to make it look colorful but costing much less then full CMYK color. That technique could be achieve by taking a greyscale image and going to Image:Mode: Duotone. I tried it myself with a nice effect.

William G · Post by **William G** » Fri Aug 27, 2004 7:11 am

Kaos, Toy:

I've just decided that one of my projects for the weekend is to give both of your suggestions a shot.

I was saving it as a .PSD. I'll give TIFF a shot.

As for why the grey... well, I simply didnt draw in a manner where it was to be colored, ie: closed lines. Call me lazy, but since most of it will be set against a natural background, I couldnt get away with the flat (paintbucket tool reliant/crutch) coloring style I developed in It's About Girls, where the backgrounds are flat as well. I wasn't feeling up to experiementing with a new method...not to mention coloring the thing by mouse. But I needed something to draw Hercule out from the background.

Who knows, maybe I'll give that a go as well. It may turn out to be less time consuming and better-looking than I thought.

I was thinking of heading to the stationary story and picking up some actual screen tones, but I didnt want to have to tool around trying to get rid of unplanned morie patterns. Great for print, crab for web.

Anyway, I'll post up some results so you can all compare when I'm done.

Rip Tanion · Post by **Rip Tanion** » Fri Aug 27, 2004 3:04 pm

William G wrote:I was thinking of heading to the stationary [store] and picking up some actual screen tones.

Gees, G, where do you get screentones (aka zippatone) nowadays? The art store I used to buy them from stopped selling them years ago. The guy there said "Dey got dose computers to do dat stuff now."; which was one of the reasons I went out and got a computer.

BTW Interesting beginning to the strip. Hope it goes someplace. Agatha Christie meets Tolkien?

William G · Post by **William G** » Sat Aug 28, 2004 12:51 am

Rip, that's one of the beauties of living next door to Japan. Zip/screen tone is cheap and plentyfull here in Korea. And that page is just the exposition part of the story, I'm aiming for "whimsical" with this one.

Right now I'm having stupid computer problems again. So all art progress has been slowed to a crawl.

Thanks for the feedback fellows, updates will appear as they happen.

gazorenzoku · Post by **gazorenzoku** » Sat Aug 28, 2004 1:18 pm

yeah, speaking of japan, our art stores here are jam packed with all sorts of zip tone screen sheets. a real zip tone paradise. How ironic that I don't use it....

Hey, so, I think you should make the text bigger. Easier to read. Other than that, everything seemed fine to me.

In general, I think the absolute best way to go with line art is to scan it in in black and white mode at 600 dpi, and then after that you can reduce it to whatever dpi you want to work with, and change the mode to grayscale or color or whatever. But that's just me. I didn't see anything wrong with the quality of your lines. Just the smallness of the text.