Digitizing Artwork, or: "Just Cram it in the Floppy Drive"

I have a stack of comic pages drawn on paper, and I need to get them into the computer, where I will clean them up, complete the typography, and colour them. This is how we get from here to there.

This post turned out longer than expected. I guess there's more that goes into this part of the process than I thought, though in keeping with the spirit of this book, I'm trying new things: I need to figure out how to process the occasional watercolour wash and preserve its gentle qualities while simultaneously knocking the ink lines into crisp black and white territory, and I am taking scary new steps—er, I mean experimenting—with new software.

Trim Pages

I drew everything on sheets of paper measuring 11”x17”. However, most of the time, my actual drawing area is a bit smaller. Since my scanner is only 8.5"x11", I have to scan the pages in three pieces, then stitch them together. If I remove an inch and a half from each page, I can scan the page in two pieces, which saves time.

[ ^ Half a page at a time. The book on top provides pressure that evens out some wobbles in the paper. The wobbles can ruin the scan.]

Scan — 24bit, 1pass, TIFF

I scan using third-party software called VueScan. One great feature that VueScan offers is automatic multi-pass scanning. It runs the scan head past the image multiple times and uses some sort of wizardry to combine the multiple scans into one, theoretically minimizing noise or other scanner-related interference in the image. I tested it out and could not see any meaningful difference between 1 pass and multiple passes, which is weird because the last time I was using this scanner, it did make a difference. I don’t know what’s changed.

I also tried scanning in 48bit, thinking it would give me more useful information with which to make smoother, higher-quality adjustments later, but after some basic testing, it didn’t seem to make much difference.

I scan to TIFF because it’s losslessly compressed. Big files, but I can monkey with them without introducing re-compression artifacts.

Photomerge and Stitch in PS

Dylan Meconis suggested that Photoshop’s “photomerge” feature has been greatly improved, and makes the process of stitching together scans easier. In practice, it does in fact do a great job… about 75% of the time. The other 25%, it skews one of the pieces in a weird way, and I have to align them manually. Oh well.

Revisit Size Template

I make a template page with markings for page trim and bleed into which the clean scanned pages will be transferred. Since I’m doing DD4 a little differently, I think I might set up the template for traditional bande-dessinée size, just in case France calls. I think that proportion scales well down to First Second’s usual size, though it's a bit wider than is ideal for North American “trade paperback” or floppy-comic proportions. I will experiment to find a good compromise. No matter what sort of digital format DD4 is delivered in, I would like the option to have it printed as a nice big book, so I need to plan for that now. Better to plan for too-big and have too much resolution, because while you can always downsample later, you can’t add information back in.

[ ^ A page with a variety of greys to deal with, both as pencil (panel one) and watercolour (the middle panel).]

Test Hi-Gamma + Lo-Gamma Versions on 2 Layers

The most important step in processing these pages is taking the raw scan and converting it to a nice, clean black and white image. When the scan comes in, it’s easy to see the brush strokes in the black ink, and it’s easy to see the paper texture. I want to knock all the paper-white part out to pure white, and I want all the solid blacks to be solid black. That’s easy.

The hard part is preserving the quality of the grey gradations in the pencilwork and watercolour washes. 

Here's my solution: once I have the scanned page all stitched-together, I add one “curves” adjustment layer. I set this so the black is a little bit blacked-out and the white is cleaned to a reasonable degree, but the contrast isn't so jacked up that the mid-range loses its nice quality. Then I add a second “curves” adjustment layer where I crank up the contrast, making the whites and blacks are clean as they can be. This destroys the greys, so I manually paint out the sections where I don’t want that level of extreme contrast. It's time-consuming, but I get the best of both worlds.

Having clean whites is important because if you retain some of the little grey specks that naturally occur with this type of material, it can lead to muddy-looking colours in the end product.

[See? Gotta get rid of those streakies. (This is somewhat exaggerated from how it looks in real life. As cereal boxes might say, it is "enhanced to show texture.")]

Make New Panel Borders, Tame + Optimize

As discussed in a previous post, I add panel borders digitally, cutting and pasting them from hand-drawn lines. The previous borders were drawn in pencil, so have a pencil-y texture. I made some new ink ones. After scanning them and messing around with them, I don’t know, they might be a bit too wobbly, and I think I might prefer the texture of the old pencil ones. So I’ll finish tidying up the new ones and give them a test run.

Process Line Art w/ Panel Borders in PS

Gotta add those panel borders! This is easy for me using Photoshop, where I find the manipulation tools are more intuitive than in Clip Studio Paint. Oh, did I mention I’m trying out the features of Clip Studio Paint? Everyone raves about it, so I’m going to see how well it will meet my needs.

Export Select Brushes from PS

There are a handful of brushes I use regularly in Photoshop, including one that I use for making text balloons. The balloons start as vector paths, which I stroke using a “balloon outliner” brush designed specifically for the purpose. It gives the vector shapes a nice, natural line quality and minimizes the vector feel of them, so they sit better against the hand-drawn, sometimes textural line art.

Import Brushes into Clip

Gotta find out if those brushes look the same in Clip Studio as they do in Photoshop. Clip advertises .ABR brush import, but do I dare expect their implementation to work identically? (Chuckles darkly to self.)

Test Clip Balloon + Text Tools

The upside to making balloons in Photoshop is that I’m familiar with Photoshop, and I know exactly how to get the effect I want (layering multiple balloons, cutting balloons into panels, etc). A downside is that I have to manually sharpen the point of every balloon tail. When stroking a vector path, Photoshop gives the balloon tail a rounded point, which I do not care for.

Let’s see what Clip Studio does. It’s got dedicated balloon tools, and if I can successfully reproduce the line quality I achieved in Photoshop, and maintain the various panel border interactions I’m used to, then I should also gain the ability to keep the balloons as vector objects, which would add flexibility. Do I need that flexibility? In past books, I’ve only ever had to adjust balloons maybe once for every thirty pages or so (it’s easier to re-write the text to fill roughly the same space), so perhaps not.

Will this lock me into finishing the work using Clip Studio? I’m not sure. And I don’t know whether that would be a good or a bad thing. Its flatting tools look promising, and I like its little colour-mixer palette. I’m much, much more fluent in Photoshop—e.g., I can complete an entire page without pulling down a single menu—but also, recent versions of Photoshop have been flaky on my machine. The whole situation makes me sigh and thinking longingly of my old copy of PS CS5, which was stable every day for at least a decade. That old version will apparently work on my current MacOS—Mojave—though I will *eventually* need to move away from it, and if that means transitioning to Clip Studio, then I might as well start now.

Reader, if you have any Clip Studio resources that you’d like to share, please do not hesitate to do so!