The Making of PTD - Scanning
I wanted to keep a record of everything I'm doing to produce a comic now adays. Various things are different from the previous books I've worked on, but since I'm in the middle of actually producing one I thought everything would be clearer and more helpful.

This past week in preparation of making the book I've needed to scan in all of my pages (which is a different chapter all together, one that I'll try to write about during the actual work on a few pages of PTD coming up).

My goal at the moment is just to get high-quality scans that I can save for future use. I'll scan them at work since they have a nice scanner. I'm going to capture 600 dpi RGB images at 48-bit to get the most information in one pass as I can. It's best to overkill at this point, because I can always downsample for anything I need to use the pages for.

The first thing to do is pull a page out of my portfolio where I've been storing them. I'm almost done with part one and my next scan happens to be Page 46. During the creation stage I chose a size and format for my originals that would fit directly on a legal sized scanner. That way I won't have to scan each page more than once. I set all the size and bit depth variables in the scanner software and leave my other settings where they are. These are the same settings I used with profiling my scanner (which is a whole long discussion in itself).



This is the raw scan. Not too bad, it's picked up a lot of the subtle washes that I use. The color seems a bit wonky compared to my original.



Now I'll go into Photoshop to IMAGE > MODE > ASIGN PROFILE and pick my scanner profile (you can make your own or if you're really lucky a nice one can be found for your scanner, or even better, WITH your scanner.)

Now the computer has adjusted the image against what my profile thinks is more accurate. It also seems to have lightened the image and the blacks aren't as dark as I would like for printing. I'll adjust under IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > LEVELS to give me more depth and contrast.



First I pick the black point dropper and select a spot in the page that best represents black (or what I want to be black). Sometimes you have to experiment if you accidentally select a really dark brown and shift your color to "funky". Select again and check your colors.



Then I pick the white point dropper and select a white area (usually on the edge away from my actual drawing). This will be the whitest part of your image.



Now I want to bump up the intensity of the color a bit so I'll enter in a new value for they mid-point. If I had a nice color scale to scan with my image I could pick a neutral gray and get even more accurate color, but I don't.



Here's my finished scan that has been profiled and leveled. I'll save this monster for later and move on to the next page until I've got them all. Then I'll back the files up on DVD for storage and later use.

In the next "part" I'll clean up any trash in my scans, fix spelling and art errors, tweak the colors, and start re-arranging my pages for print.