Templating With the Best of Them!

I’ve been dreading writing today’s column for a while now.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to tackle the subject at all.  I can’t stress enough how important today’s column is if you want to be any kind of artist in the comic book industry.  If I haven’t scared you off yet, you are probably wondering what could be this important that I would be scared to write about it.  Today’s column is all about setting up your page in Photoshop correctly.  It is about how to take your finished piece of artwork (be it a comic book interior page, or graphic novel page), scan it, and set it up in the correct fashion to be printed in a regularly sized comic book.  I can’t stress enough how important it is for a comic book artist to learn how to step up their files digitally, so that all the specs, sizes, and formats are correct and consistent.  Whether you are a penciller, inker, or letterer, or colorist, you must know how to template a page the “DC Comics Way”.

Up until now, I’ve been telling you all about the kind of corrections we face on a normal day here in Pre-Press.  Those corrections are numerous and fun.  But the biggest problem we face everyday is pages coming in from artists that are not formatted correctly, not templated correctly, or just files that are unusable.  So many artists today think they know what they are doing, when in fact, they just don’t.  Whether it is from a lack of knowledge in Photoshop, laziness, or just a complete misunderstanding of the way we need files to be saved to be able to print a comic book, the most important step is usually the one taken for granted.  For an artist, just because the page is pencilled and inked, doesn’t not mean you are done with your work.  That page needs to be scanned correctly, and formatted to our specs correctly, and a lot of artists don’t take this step seriously.  I’ve seen far too often that an artist puts his blood, sweat, and tears into a comic book page he or she has drawn, and then sends us a scan of that page, only to find it is pixelated, dirty, splotchy, crooked, washed out, too light or too dark, amoung a million other problems.  What an artist has to remember is that when they are sending their pages in digitally, we as Production people, take that to be a FINAL FILE.  A final file is a file that we get from an artist that signifies they are done with a particular page.  If that artist does not give us a perfect scan and correctly formatted file, all of that hard work drawing that page goes out the window.  The final file should be a perfect representation of the art the artist wants to use in the printed comic.

Now, how do you make sure you scan and template a page correctly so as to get the absolute best quality file to use?  I will tell you, but before I do I’ll mention the tools you need to be able to do this.  Whether you use a MAC or a PC, it is best to make sure you are using at least Photoshop 10 or higher.  At DC, we use Photoshop CS3, and at home I have CS4.  If you are a freelance artist, you must invest in your profession and get the adobe programs.  As for a scanner, you do not need the top of line, most expensive one.  You can do fine with any scanner that just fits your page size.  If you draw on regular comic book board, be it a DC board, Wildstorm board, Marvel board or Blueline Pro board, the size should be about 11 inches by 17 inches.  So the scanner needs to have at least a 11 x 17 scan window.  Each scanner has it’s own software that comes with it but it’s all similar.  At DC, we use a Microtek Scanmaker 9800XL, but those can run very expensive. I would do some research online and see what you can find, but some cheaper ones are the Musket scanners, which would do fine. You can also check www.newegg.com, they’re a pretty good website for price
and to see what’s  out there. I’ve also heard that Epson makes really good hi end scanners.

Now that you have the tools, you can start setting up your page.  First you want to scan your page at 100%, 600 dpi, in grayscale.  Even if your artwork is just black and white line work, I still recommend scanning in grayscale at first.  Now that you have done this, you can open the scan in Photoshop.  Zoom in and check the line work, and make sure that you didn’t scan it too light, or too dark, and that all the lines you want to be in the final file, are clear and crisp.  If it is not, rescan, and play with the contrast just a little bit.  If you are happy with the scan, but want to spice up the contrast some more, play with Image>Mode>Adjustments.  There you can bump up the blacks and make the whites whiter.  Also zoom in about 50%, and clean up any borders and stray “dots” or dirtiness that may have been picked up by the scanner.

Now you can step up your template.  We usually provide each freelance artist with our template already step up as a blank Photoshop file.  Since I can’t give you that here (maybe I can, I’ll check with the big boss man), I will explain it best I can.  In the simplest terms, it is a blank (white) file, that is 6.875 inches by 10.438 inches, at 600 dpi resolution.  You can find all this info in the Image>Image Size box in the Photoshop toolbar.  The file should also be grayscale!  On our template we also set up the guide lines that should be used for the safety and crop marks.  We layout the guides so that the artist can see where the file should be centered, and how much wiggle room he has before his work gets cropped off when we go to print the page.  Depending on how the page was drawn, if you drew on a comic book board, these guides shoul,d match the guides on the board.  It’s not a perfect match because the template is now at comic book size, and your artwork is still at 11 x 17, but that is the next step in the process.  If you want to set up the guides yourself, please use the following info, and place your lines at the following inch marks (top and bottom):

Crop Guides at: Quarter of an inch in from the file edge.

Safety Guides at: a half inch in from the edge of the file.

Example of template:

Now that you have the template set up correctly, you can finally set up your page correctly.  Open both the template file, and the scan of the page of your artwork.  Select the entire scan (command “A” on a MAC).  We are going to re-size the page to fit to comic book size.  Since it is in grayscale, you can mess with the image size.  Go to File>Free Transform.  In the free transform toolbox that pops up, link the height an width together.  There is a chain link in the middle of both values, so click that “on”.  Then input 67%, for that is the size that your file needs to be to drag into the template to fit to comic book size.  Hit enter.  Now select all on the file again and drag (using the black select tool in Photoshop) it into the template file you have open next to your scan.  This will place the artwork on a new layer in the template.  Drag the art until you have it completely centered on the page.  Zoom in if you have to and use the arrow tools on your keyboard to move it up and down, left and right, until you get it to where you would like it.  Be sure to check if your file is full bleed or not.  This means that if your artwork was drawn to the safeties on the comic board, you just center your image in the template.  Very simple.  But if you drew past the safties all the way to the crop marks on the comic board, then your artwork is called full bleed.  When you drag your scan into the template and your art is full bleed, then the artwork should disappear off the file itself.  The artwork should go past the guide lines you set up for the crop area, and go “off” into the furthest reaches of the file itself.  This is very important.  Do not leave any white area around the art if your artwork is full bleed.  See the two examples blow.

Example of templated page centered within safety:

Example of templated page centered with full bleed:

Now that your scan is centered in the template or full bleed on the template, you can start to finalize your file.  The first thing to do is flatten the image, which will place it into file as the background, and not be a layered file anymore.  Go to Layer>Flatten Image.  Now you have a flattened templated image.  The next step you do ONLY if you have any gray tones in your artwork.  Most comic art is inked and in black and white at this stage.  If you have any tones in your files, any gray “color”, or has any pencils that you do not want to lose, then you do NOT do the next step.  If the art is only black and white, you must convert the file to BITMAP from GRAYSCALE.  To do this, you go to Image>Mode>Bitmap.  A toolbox will pop up, and this is where you must input the CORRECT VALUES!  The box will come up and say, “Resolution, Input 600 pixels/inch”.  Under that it will say “Output:_____ pixels/inch”.  The output value you enter should be equal to the resolution of the file, which is 600 dpi.  Next, the Method value.  This is crucial!  It should say “Use:______”.  The value you input here should be “50% Threshold”.  ONLY use 50% Threshold.  If you do not, your artwork will turn to a pixelated disaster.  Can’t tell you how many artists do not do this correctly, and wonder why we don’t accept their files.  DO NOT USE “Diffusion Dither”, ever.

Now you are finally done templating your comic book page digitally.  You are ready to save.  When you do a “Save As”, before to label your file correctly.  If it is page 13 of a Batman comic book, make sure you label it as such.  Put the page number it is, and also type in the dpi of the file.  Follow that with the .tif because you are saving it as a TIF file, and nothing else.  Do not save it as a jpg, or a png, or a bmp, or even a psd file.  Use only .tif.  So for example it should look like this: BM 1.13.600.tif.  Click enter to save it, and a second toolbox will appear asking you some TIF save options you want to use.  The image compression we use is LZW.  Make sure that box is checked.  The pixel order should be “Interleaved”, and the Byte Order, MACINTOSH if you are using a MAC, even if you are suing a PC.  Then thats it, hit “OK”.

I hope none of this was too confusing, and please, if you have any questions, please let me know, because, to me, this is all very simple.  But to someone who is not familiar with this process, you may feel like I am speaking gibberish.  So just to summarize:

Scan 11 x 17 boards at 600dpi, 67% (print size) grayscale

place the scanned image into the grayscale template

within the template you will use some blue guidelines, they will not print.  these are digital representations of the guidelines on the art boards.  the inner blue box is the copy safety or live area, the outer blue box is the trim or crop and the edge of the template is the full bleed line.

position your art as needed.  Most artwork should fit close to the inner blue guide line (the safety).  For full bleed artwork, the art must go completely to the end the file itself, past the outer blue guide line.

Template sizes:

regular page: 6.875 x 10.438

Thanks for reading, and good luck in setting up your files!

CjB

PS- For a double page spread the template size is 13.487 x 10.438, but that’s a whole separate column, so i will talk about that next week.


PPS- I just got my copy of the the best book to date on how to work digitally in comics.  All this is covered in this book, as well as a million other things.  The book called The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics
(Paperback) by Freddie Williams III.  It is an AMAZING book, and has become our new textbook for the bullpen.  I recommend it 200% if you want to get with the times, and become a full comic book artist.  It should be required reading for all, I can not stress that enough!