Sharpness...

Jackhass · Post by **Jackhass** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 4:26 am

Hey guys, need some a bit of help here.

I'm finding my comics often come out just a little blurrier than I'd like. I scan them at 300 dpi and save them in .jpg format at a pretty high quality setting, but they still end up a little blurry. Which is disappointing...I'd like the comics to look as sharp as they do on paper, or at least as close as possible.

So, what do you guys do to ensure optimal sharpness from your comics?

Oh, and I suppose I oughta' provide a link to my strip...

http://monkeys.keenspace.com/

...any other comments and criticisms on the strip are welcome (even though I only have 2 posted so far)...heh, provided they're glowingly positive of course.

BOMC · Post by **BOMC** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 5:09 am

well, I took a quick look at your comics and they don't look blurry to me, but....

You can either try using a "sharpen" tool, or perhaps trying scanning them at a higher dpi. But, like I said, I think they look fine.

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 5:51 am

Seem fine to me but the font seems to be one that doesn't like to get too small. It's fine for the normal speech, though.

Unrelated: You'd be better off saving the comics as GIFs. You can reduce their size to a third in this case.

- Joel Fagin

BRP · Post by **BRP** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 6:31 am

Your style is so clean you really ought to save as GIF or PNG. Jpeg is probably what is doing this to you. Actually, my style isn't really clean and I still save in PNG.

...of course, to keep my comic from looking too pencilly (and to get rid of the paper texture from the scan, as well as my bad erasing job), I do use the Layer -> Colors -> Levels dialog in the GIMP. I believe Ctrl-L gets you the same thing in Photoshop. It also helps it compress better.... All I do is move the white marker to the left of the spike on the right, and move the black marker to the right of the hump on the left. Program does the rest, I guess.

It turns this:

into this:

Then I shrink it down, which hides even more of my crappiness. Yay.

Alaina · Post by **Alaina** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 11:51 am

Yes, I agree. I think you just need to adjust the contrast. If you have photoshop, you can either go to Image-->Adjust-->Brightness/Contrast and then move the Brightness lever down and the Contrast lever up or you can go Image-->Adjust-->Levels, which basically does the same thing but is more versatile.

Hiye · Post by **Hiye** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 12:55 pm

You could always go to sharpen - unsharp mask and mess around with the settings there. And as others have said, changing the contrast could help you a lot.

A tactic I sometimes use to find a good balance between blurry and sharp is to make another layer of the background and then do threshold to it. This puts everything in either black or white (or you could just do extreme contrast for the same effect). Then, I change the opacity and blending mode until it's just darker than the background, and do a slight gaussian blur to the background. And then, play around with the opacities to make either the really sharp contrasty background stand out more than the fuzzier one.

Uh, yeah.. was that confusing?

Jackhass · Post by **Jackhass** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 2:05 pm

They don't look blurry to you guys? Heh, I thought I might get that response...I tend to be unreasonably critical of my own stuff and often point out flaws most people don't even notice.

I'll try switching over to gif format though...like someone said, I'm keeping my style relatively simple for this strip, so it's not like I really even need .jpg format.

Anywho...any more comments/advice on the blurriness thing or just anything are welcome...

Faub · Post by **Faub** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 2:56 pm

Only a little bit. It's not like they're unreadable. If might also be that you're saving as jpeg and the save includes some smoothing. Try indexing the colors and saving as PNG or GIF so see if the sharpness comes back.

Jackhass · Post by **Jackhass** » Sun Jul 04, 2004 10:39 pm

New comic up...

...hmmmm, still a bit blurrier than I'd like...but oh well.

Taiwanimation · Post by **Taiwanimation** » Mon Jul 05, 2004 3:00 pm

With your style, I'd go with 16-grayscale GIF.