SCANNING

In the olden days people coloured by hand (we're old, we remember these days, we even made an attempt ourselves), either directly on copies of the inked pages or on separate pages using the light-box. But these days most colouring is done by using programs such as Adobe Photoshop so the inked pages need to be scanned first.

We basically scan our work as black /white line art at a dpi of 600. Considering the eventual size of the comic pages, this should be enough. Of course you can go higher if you want, but this will make the files larger and not all computers can handle that well. As our pages are too large to scan in one go they are scanned in 2 or 3 times, depending on the amount of strips, and each file is then duplicated according to the number of panels on that file. The exact measurements we have written down on paper so the next thing to do is to simply crop the panels to their right sizes. At this stage you should also take a closer look at your work and clean any specks and smudges that shouldn't be there.

Save your panels as .psd or .tiff files with logical names like Pag01Pan01 or Alb04Pag23Pan05. You'll end up with lots of these files so it's better keep to things clear right from the start. Of course if you've drawn and inked the panel frames by hand it makes sense to scan and save the page in strips rather than in panels or even complete pages if you work at A4 size or smaller. It's all a matter of preference.