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New Charley's War Printing

Started by Tjm86, 30 October, 2017, 06:09:23 PM

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Proudhuff

Is Mrs Mills laddie getting a cut this time?  :-X
DDT did a job on me

Tjm86

Quote from: The Amstor Computer on 28 November, 2017, 12:11:13 PM

B&W art should be easier to deal with in theory

Speaking from experience when I have scanned the odd early prog page, the big issue is with the thickness of the paper which means that the reverse side image distorts the output.  IIRC it requires a high brightness / contrast setting to compensate which is what produces some of the results we are seeing.  Very much depends on the quality of the material in question as well as the scanning tools I would have thought.

Of course now I'm going to sit back and see my understanding torn to shreds by more knowledgeable minds!   ::)  (For which I will be grateful).

TordelBack

Quote from: Proudhuff on 28 November, 2017, 01:51:28 PM
Is Mrs Mills laddie getting a cut this time?  :-X

He claims so, in some limited capacity based on morality rather than legality.  Joe Colquhoun's estate likewise.  If this is the case, I tip my cap to Rebellion.




The Amstor Computer

Quote from: Tjm86 on 28 November, 2017, 02:22:29 PM
Speaking from experience when I have scanned the odd early prog page, the big issue is with the thickness of the paper which means that the reverse side image distorts the output.  IIRC it requires a high brightness / contrast setting to compensate which is what produces some of the results we are seeing.  Very much depends on the quality of the material in question as well as the scanning tools I would have thought.

Of course now I'm going to sit back and see my understanding torn to shreds by more knowledgeable minds!   ::)  (For which I will be grateful).

No tearing apart here (not sure I qualify as more knowledgeable, mind ;) )

Bleed-through can be an issue with scanned pages, and it can take a bit of care to either (a) avoid it in the first place (I've had some limited success using a white backing on a page, IIRC) or to (b) correct it in processing. From experience (repro on Library of Death, Baker's Half-Dozen, Thirteenth Floor, Dracula File, Tower King, House of Daemon and some miscellaneous other bits and bobs for Hibernia) B&W linework can be relatively straightforward to process depending on how good a result you want.

The simplest method I've found, and what I'd use for something like posting an example page or panel at reduced size online, is to scan the page at something like 300dpi (to keep file size down) in greyscale. Run that through a level adjustment in Photoshop (crush either end of the range to get clean whites and deep blacks) then a threshold adjustment to push that further, then halve the resolution, sharpening on reduction. That will give you a quick & dirty "clean" page for online use etc. but it will still have some major issues - if you're that aggressive with threshold and level adjustment you can end up with severe loss of detail, thickened lines and ruined cross-hatching etc. and none of the other issues with the art will be dealt with.

If I was preparing a page for a new reprint, I'd start with a higher-resolution scan - I've experimented with 1200dpi and 600dpi for my starting file, and to be honest I think 1200dpi was a crazy overreach and I wouldn't bother now (with two exceptions, more on which below). Take that greyscale scan and run a fairly aggressive level correction, being careful to check for loss of detail on fine lines, hatching etc. I'd then run a fairly full-on unsharp mask pass to sharpen up some of the finer detail and - depending on the source DPI and intended final use - resize down to 300/600 dpi (with bicubic sharpening if appropriate - not always needed, I find)

If the source is good - a nice, near-pristine page of strong, simple linework on newsprint, say - then that might be about all that's needed and it's pretty much done barring some final conversion and tidy-up. Unfortunately, most of the available source material isn't in that condition and you'll normally be dealing with a range of issues, from damaged pages, to misprints, or simple deterioration from age, and more detailed art doesn't take that brute force approach well.

By way of example, the most common issue I have is that characteristic "patchy" look you get on old newsprint pages, where the whites have specks of grey-black "scruff" and the blacks are full of flecks of grey-white. You can compensate for this a bit by being extra-aggressive on tweaking levels and running a threshold adjustment, but the downside of that is that it can end up thickening thin lines and making fine detail run together. The only way I've found of dealing with it (to my satisfaction, natch  :) ) is to make manual corrections - that is, going in with the paintbrush and painting in/out any scruff, comparing all the time to the original scan to make sure that I'm correcting the right things.

That correction and manual clean-up will give you what I think is a pretty damn good result (the B&W strips in the Eagle Adventure Special, for example, were done like this and I think they look pretty good side-by-side with the source material) but it is pretty bloody time-consuming, and more so if you decide to try and fix particularly fiddly issues like patchy lettering (which can sometimes mean manually redrawing sections of the lettering/balloons) or damaged art. I suspect there is a way to automate a lot of the process if you had the software knowledge (and I'd expect Rebellion's repro pipeline to do something there...) but I haven't found a solution that works for me yet.

* My exceptions above - I scanned the House of Daemon art and the Eagle Adventure Special photo-strip at 1200dpi then resized down to 600dpi in an effort to avoid moire. I'm not sure it was entirely successful with the photo-strip, but it gave a reasonable result, and I think it worked pretty well for House of Daemon. Pain in the arse handling the files though - they're enormous! The other reason I'd scan at that resolution is if I want to blow a detail up to enormous size in a layout - for example, I've just finished laying out an article with a bit about the Eagle photo-strips, and I wanted to have details from the strips blown up to a size where the dots of the printing process were visible, almost to the point where the photo itself was lost and abstracted.

maryanddavid

Amstor that could be an article in the next Comic Archive! Think we could squeeze it in :lol:

The Amstor Computer

Quote from: maryanddavid on 28 November, 2017, 10:54:57 PM
Amstor that could be an article in the next Comic Archive! Think we could squeeze it in :lol:

  :lol:

My other half was looking over my shoulder while I wrote all that - she took one look at the splurge of text and just sighed and shook her head at me :-)

Tjm86

There're some nice ideas here.  I think, as you say, professionally there are probably solutions that can address some of the issues but source material is likely to be the biggest challenge due to the age and the quality of the original material.  Daemon and Tower King are both fine examples of how effective your techniques are.  Both stand up well in comparison with the originals.  As you say, at that sort of resolution file size becomes quite an issue as well which impacts on processing time.  In terms of personal computing we seem to have hit something of a plateau in terms of tools for this sort of thing so that is likely to be an issue. 

Thanks for that.

The Amstor Computer

Quote from: Tjm86 on 29 November, 2017, 06:16:56 AM
There're some nice ideas here.  I think, as you say, professionally there are probably solutions that can address some of the issues but source material is likely to be the biggest challenge due to the age and the quality of the original material.  Daemon and Tower King are both fine examples of how effective your techniques are.  Both stand up well in comparison with the originals.  As you say, at that sort of resolution file size becomes quite an issue as well which impacts on processing time.  In terms of personal computing we seem to have hit something of a plateau in terms of tools for this sort of thing so that is likely to be an issue. 

Thanks for that.

Hope it wasn't too much of a boring wall of text!

I can kinda imagine how you could set up some kind of automation of the process I use (aside from just creating a Photoshop action for it) and I suspect there's probably a way to even do some of the manual work that way but I think it still needs human oversight on every page, and quite likely at least some hand-correction.

Whatever Rebellion are doing to get the quality they're getting at the rate they're managing is pretty impressive, though. I reckon on being able to manage a couple of B&W pages a day on a good day, but with other commitments and looking after my kids that's not very often. Assuming I managed that five days a week, and maybe fitted the odd page in at the weekend, I'd be able to do something like 40-ish pages a month, and if I could sustain that across a year working pretty much full-time outside of school holidays, I could maybe hit 400+ pages if I was very lucky.

By my back-of-an-envelope calculations, Rebellion have hit around 800-900 pages in 2017 on Treasury of British Comics material alone (Leopard of Lime Street, One-Eyed Jack, Marney the Fox, Faceache, Dracula File, Misty Vol. 2, the Tornado reprints in the Meg) and even assuming they started work immediately on the material back in August/September 2016 when they announced their acquisition of the Fleetway/IPC archives they've still had barely a year - and that's on top of whatever repro work has been necessary for the Mega Collection, other 2000AD reprints like Luke Kirby (a huge task in itself!) etc.

It's a huge investment in time and expertise from them.

Tjm86

I would say that in the mean time we need a history of IPC comics volume.  We've got Thrill Power Overload, Barkers Action and Gifford's Book of Comics (which has way too much American crap in it) but we desperately need someone to do a history of British Comics, especially the post war era.

Apestrife

Sounds great. If it's three or so volumes, I'll probably pick these up :)