Tuesday, June 10, 2003
 
 
 
Version 1.1 :: Plethora of Purple

Bitmap-type file 0:00 (2:06)

Our file is now in Photoshop, as a Grayscale/lineart Bitmap (BMP): Black and white: no shades of gray or anything. This step isn't really much of anything ^^; Just showing you that, while zoomed out, it may look like pretty nice lineart, going in close shows that it's really very pixel-y. Sort of like MS Paint, I think oO; Don't worry, though, this is why I scanned in 400dpi, because of our next step...

Ink CleanUp 0:10 (2:12)

While still in Bitmap mode, I zoom in and bust out the hand-dandy eraser (hotkey: E). Because there's no shades of gray, there's no transparency, either, so it's like erasing with the pencil tool or whatever. Anyway, it works really well, since everything's pixelized anyway. Most of my inking errors are gone now... the one at the top-right of the first frame in particular. Depending on how badly I inked, this can take me anywhere from a minute to a half-hour oO; Usually not a half-hour, but the second comic.. eh~ ^^; I spent an hour and a half erasing and I STILL hadn't gotten all the mistakes out of it ^^;

Resizing and bringing to RGB mode 0:07 (2:20)

This step actually is filled with various little steps, and involves a lot of use of the Image menu. First thing I do is to convert my BMP to Grayscale by going under Image>Mode>Grayscale. This little window pops up, asking me what I want the size ratio to be. I want it to stay the same size, so I keep 1 in the box (I think that's the factory default, but I dunno for sure ^^;). Hitting OK appears to not do anything to it, but trust me, it's a very important step *nod* Oo; Then go Image>Mode>RBG Color, which also appears to not do anything, but it, too, is important (if your image is in grayscale, you can't color it, only shade Oo;;)

This is the same window, found through Image>Image Size. On the left, I changed only the resolution, which was 400dpi, and I brought it down to 200. This changed the pixel dimentions on top (the ones I really care about for the purposes of FoD). The set dimentions I have for each comic are so: 1628 pixels wide by 2120 high in 200dpi (when I bring it down for the web, I only change the resolution to 72dpi (the standard), none of the other dimentions). Changing just the dpi down to 200 gives us a file that's smaller than my default size, whereas changing the width to match (on the right) makes our height too high, so to speak. However...

If I change the width to be 1600 instead (28 pixels less than my maximum), the height is also well within bounds (six pixels short of the desired size). I decided that, when I tried it this way, it looked about right, and I needed to add a little more white space on the sides, anyway, so I left it this way and hit OK.

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Flow of Destiny is written by Alisha Farnsworth, and illustrated by Alicia Kilpatrick. Flow of Destiny © 2002 Aslua Studios. It is hosted on Keenspace, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics.