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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 30 July 2015 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | 1  

One of the reasons art for magazines, including comics, is traditionally done larger than the printed size is that reduction helps sharpen up the image, especially line work.

Or so the story goes.

Received today comp copies of BACK ISSUE magazine, sent my way because the Avengers vs Defenders commission I did for Scott Green back in '07 is used as the cover. This was a 20x30" piece, so reduced to magazine size the lines should have been so sharp one could cut oneself upon them.

Only, they're not. In what seems to be my curse, the lines are fuzzy. Some have even dropped out! White areas have closed up, so Namor has lost half his teeth, and Dr. Strange all of his.

And you know who'll get blamed for this, right?

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Matt Hawes
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Posted: 30 July 2015 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | 2  

Do you think the coloring had any effect on the reproduction?

Unless "Back Issue" commissioned a colorist, I figured they grabbed the color version from online, and if so, the person coloring the picture would have been using the scanned image which might explain the fuzziness.

Here's a link to a thumbnail pic from Twomorrows site: LINK

Here's a higher res version from Comic Vine that was from another colorist: LINK






Edited by Matt Hawes on 30 July 2015 at 5:00pm
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Matt Hawes
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Posted: 30 July 2015 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | 3  

I found a high res picture online of the BACK ISSUE cover: LINK


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George Lee
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Posted: 30 July 2015 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | 4  

Looking at the cover online it looks like they went to press with an image that didn't have optimum resolution. 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say Scott Green didn't send in the original 20x30 piece for BACK ISSUE to professionally scan at 1200 dpi b/w line-art to be turned over to a colorist.
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Marc Cheek
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Posted: 30 July 2015 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | 5  

Reproduction notwithstanding, that is an awesome commission!
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 31 July 2015 at 3:42am | IP Logged | 6  

Here's a higher res version from Comic Vine that was from another colorist: LINK

••

Oh, God! You made me LOOK!!!!

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Eric Jansen
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Posted: 31 July 2015 at 4:22am | IP Logged | 7  

Okay, I have actually had a few pieces published in TwoMorrows' ALTER-EGO magazine and one piece I did had Captain America and Captain Video facing off against Ultron and Makino.  I followed the reference and gave Captain Video two pockets on his chest.  TwoMorrows had it colored--and one of the pockets disappeared!

I didn't think it was prudent to press Roy Thomas on whether that pocket was removed on purpose on not!  Still, it remained a mystery!

Now I'm thinking that maybe the colorist (if they used the same guy) accidentally(?) removes some linework as he lays down the colors.
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Ed Love
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Posted: 31 July 2015 at 8:26am | IP Logged | 8  

Presumably they are rescaling the image in photoshop or similar program and the line work is in grayscale. It' not like photographic reduction, the artwork is basically being re-interpreted and the line quality can lose crispness if not re-sharpened.

There are several other ways for this quality loss to creep in depending on the experience of the person preparing the files for final output. I've come across many professionals that would treat non-vector based, non-bitmapped artwork the same as they would a photograph which in the printing world is a dpi twice that of the screen frequency, topping out around 300 dpi depending on the press. However, artwork that has a lot of line work such as this would suffer at that dpi. To hold the fine detail of crisp edges to the line, the dpi needs to be higher.

No need to scan the original at a super-high resolution though. Scan at 300 and you can easily re-size the physical dimensions to 50% at 600 without having photoshop to actually re-rasterize the image.
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Brian Hague
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Posted: 31 July 2015 at 1:24pm | IP Logged | 9  

On the topic of Roy Thomas and Alter-Ego, he took an Alex Toth drawing of Wonder Woman addressing the rest of the JSA and used it as a wraparound cover, and spoke happily in his editorial about proud he was to offer this piece to his readers and how glad he was to have the opportunity to fix Toth's costume mistakes... 

I couldn't find the full wraparound which would have included fixes for Dr. Mid-Nite and the Flash, but here you can see the addition of a fin and a flash around the Atom's chest emblem as well as a circle added to the now-smaller lantern on GL's costume.



Because nothing says you respect and honor the work of an artist like fixing his mistakes for him!

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D. Alan Allred
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Posted: 31 July 2015 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | 10  

Nope. I'm pretty sure I know what happened.

When they reduced it down to be used on a smaller scale, many of the fine lines JB expertly drew at 20" x 30", disappeared. So, to "fix" this problem they (the colorist?, the pre-press guy?) selected one of the black lines, clicked on 'select similar' (so that every black in the drawing was selected) and then expanded the pixels by about 2 points. You'll notice that all the lines seem to have the same weight in the newly rendered picture. This would also explain why Namor lost his teeth. Thicker lines means more black, and the crispness is lost by the fuzziness of the marching ants selection. I've done this type of thing many times to darken up thin lines, but not to this degree where everything goes muddy.
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Wallace Sellars
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Posted: 01 August 2015 at 11:26am | IP Logged | 11  

That B&W Alex Toth art is beautiful!
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 01 August 2015 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | 12  

Because nothing says you respect and honor the work of an artist like fixing his mistakes for him!

•••

I may throw up.

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