“Big City Secrets” has been finished for almost 4 months. At least the artwork has. The scanning, the re-lettering and the work in Photoshop is still going on. And then there’s the cover and the printing to do. It will all be done in time for Springcon, but it’s a long, boring process. Regarding the computer touch ups, I am almost 3/4 of the way through and I hope to be done by mid-January.
I’m spending most of my evenings on the computer when I’d really like to be drawing, but this needs to get done. So I’d thought I’d share the process I go through from original art to finished page. I am using page 157 for this little demonstration.
First step, I scan in the page. I scan in grayscale in 600 DPI.
The black backgrounds are uneven, the borders are shaky and there are smudges everywhere. Then I take the image and change it into bitmap, then back to grayscale at a 50% threshold.
The contrast looks sharper, the blacks more solid and it’s already looking better. Then I get to work on shaping the borders. I color the white outside of the panels black…
…then I reshape them using the rectangle tool and redefine them with white. It’s not the most elegant of solutions but it’s one I’m used to.
Then I reletter the word balloons. Here’s the final page:
So that’s the process. Then I do the same thing for all 266 pages.
Sigh.
Tiny Boxes 
Interesting process. I still have to play with PS a lot more to figure out some of those techniques. I usually clean my strips up in ImageReady before importing them into PS. Which version of PhotoShop do you have? I found the CS3 Extended last summer for my class I had at Hennepin Tech.
I use version 6.0. I’d love to be more efficient cleaning up pages with the computer, especially with layers, I can’t seem to get the hang of that.