Digital Prepress For Comic Books: The Definitive Desktop Production Guide

By Kevin Tinsley

With over 200 pages, 300 color illustrations, and detailed instructions, this manual provides the answers and solutions needed to print a magazine. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967542308
• ISBN13: 9780967542300
• Release Date: December 2000
• Publisher: Stickman Graphics
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

A Specialty Use of Photoshop

This book is on how to get your comic book ideas from out of your head onto a disk that you can take to a printer and get him to produce the comic book for you. The advent of powerful personal computers has meant that the hand drawn, hand lettered, hand colored prints from the past no longer are what the printer wants. Instead the book now goes to the printer on a disk. Doing the work on a computer means software, and the author uses Photoshop. Most of the books on Photoshop are on manipulating photographs. Here the emphasis is on producing the art work for comic books. Photoshop obviously can do both, but the techniques and the particular tools used are different. For one thing there is a lot more information here on the printing process, including inks and paper. While the author uses Photoshop, which is the professional software used throughout the industry most of the techniques could be used with less expensive software packages, or you might try buying an older version of Photoshop through eBay.

If you read something read this!!!

Ok I'll be brief because my written English is not so good. If want to actually print your comics and you own or have access to Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop then this book is very useful to you. The book explains pre-press procedures so that you can understand how to get the juice out of your work. Now, the information is very technical so I wouldn't recomend this book to people that are not really interested in taking comics seriously. There is a fair amount of lettering tips in Illustrator and a huge amount of information about improving your scans and "retouch" your work in digital format. It also contains a chapter on Quark Xpress to achieve a good composition (having worked in comics myself I know this chapter is important).Bottom line: If you are an independent comic book artist with a small staff and you want to do the pre-press yourself then this book is a must. If you are only interested in the area of color and lettering then "maybe" you should get this book, it will definitely help you, thats for sure. Please also note that this book will not teach you how to pait using Photoshop but it will show you how to balance and work with color FOR PREPRESS.He could have used another penciller for the examples but thats just my opinion. :)

Great Great Great! Thanks Mr. Tinsely!

I got this book from Mr Tinsely himself at a convention in San Diego. My Graphic Arts instructor himself has it, and suggested it for us. My instructor himself is also a well know comic colorist. He too makes the distinction of how important pre-press details are, just as Mr. Tinsley does in this fine book. I will definitely take the pros words for it! Its terrific for both pros and people like myself (I am just starting down the comic book colorist career path). This book goes into literally every aspect of getting a comic to press and having it look as professional as possible, even for the "little guy". My main focus is on the instructions for coloring of comics (You definitely want to have a recent version of Photoshop around while coursing through this book!). It gives wonderful, detailed illustrations. The writing is to the point, but doesn't leave one in a sea of technical terms, and speaks to you as a kind instructor standing over your shoulder would. A+!!!

Fantastic resource for a small niche audience

This book is a serious, long tutorial for people interested in printing their own comic books. Fortunately, the topic is fun and is jam-packed with illustrations and screen shots, so it's still fun to read.Author Kevin Tinsley doesn't spend too much time dwelling on theory and generalities, but some people without a background in printing might think so. Trust me (I was a professional typesetter and commercial graphic designer for more than a decade), you NEED to know this stuff to get great results from your printers. Also, knowing this stuff will definitely save you money because you'll be able to do it yourself instead of having to pay someone to do it for you.Step-by-step instructions are provided for every topic covered, so you'll need two costly peices of software to follow along and get the most out of this book: Adobe Photoshop 5.0 (or higher) and Quark XPress 4.0 (or higher). These are professional applications that are considered industry standards. Even so, the general concepts are so well covered that you should be able to complete the tasks with less costly software like Corel Draw and Microsoft Publisher. Just don't be too surprised if your results don't quite match those of the pros.Without a doubt, one of the best chapters is about how to color artwork. Tinsley explains, in detail, how to scan in your artwork, place it on a top layer in Photoshop, and apply dramatic gradients to breath life into the art so it leaps off the page. This chapter -- and the one on ink and color -- makes this book a "must have" for anyone interested in comics. By the way, it's also one of the better introductions I've read for dealing with Process color, in general, so this book is valuable for anyone interested in doing their own typesetting and prepress work. (By the way, there are a bunch of typos and this book would have benefited from a skilled editor, but nevertheless, this is an extremely niche publication and we're all lucky it exists at all.)Mike Mitchell Houston, Texas

This Book Is A Winner!

Physically, the book is attractive...the layout is impeccable, the typography is excellent. It's been awhile since I've handled a how-to book that was a joy to hold and read, but this one is. Colour illustrations abound within the book, but it's not text shy...it's well written, well organized, and I would recommend it to anyone seriously interested in becoming involved in desktop comic book publishing. It's a very good, solid book. If you're serious about getting into prepress for comics, you can't go wrong buying it. NOTE: This book is best used in conjunction with Quark Xpress and Adobe Photoshop...it refers to them constantly in details of production.