This sucker's an Epson Perfection 636U. 
It was about $250 or so back in 1999. 
My computer is a G4 Power Mac, 500mHz, running OS X 10.2.8 with 512 MB of RAM.  It was pretty hot shit back in the day...

I mention this because Epson does not support this model for OS X.
There is no driver for it.  I have to boot up Mac Classic and use an earlier version of Photoshop to scan. Then I turn off the "Classic" emulation and use Photoshop SC to do the stuff.

Newer versions of the OS X doesn't support Classic, I've heard. Since I only plan to upgrade solely with donation money, guess I'm stuck with this sucker for a long time to come.

Hazards of supporting a minority OS? 

Probably..

Anyway, since all you're going to scan for comics are line art with the occasional color photo or two, any current "under a $100" scanner should be perfectly fine.

(I bought an A4 tabloid size Mustek scanner back in 2000 for $99.  A4 size scanners are mostly high end ~$2000 to $10,000 jobs, so it was a good deal... but of course it used serial cable, not USB, slow as sin, black bar artifacting, and took an hour for anything above 150 dpi.  I used it to scan in my lager drawings for some portfolios before it began to seriously wonk out so it wasn't a total loss... but still pretty bad.  I hear newer models with USB connection isn't so bad... )

This the same size paper (11 x 17, tabloid bond, trimmed to 11 x 14) the GHMC page 1A and 1B shown in part 1 and below were drawn on.

Got tired of drawing on the small 8.3 x 11 inch board all the time, and had in mind an idea to draw larger while keeping the horizontal page format.

As long as I don't draw any one panel larger the the maximum width of the scanner plate, I could scan in conveniently separate panels one at a time, thus avoiding the horror of trying to reattach panels chopped in half.

A. Scanner Gutter

  Since the scanner doesn't completely scan end to end, there's about 3/8th of an inch "gutter" at the edges of the plate. 

    To account for this I draw an inner "bleed" border that is wider on two sides of the page.  (Shown in blue arrows and how it fits on the scanner in red arrows below.)

I scan in RGB, at 300 dpi.  Fairly good size, enough to accommodate various possible output.  (The 600 and 1200 dpi's are for black and white Bitmaps, which are much more smaller in size then RGB)

B. Taking out the blueline

     After the scanning, you can take out the blue pencil lines through Photoshop by deleting all but the blue channel (from the the three channels that make up RGB, Red, Green and Blue) and converting the image to Grayscale.

You can do this in the scanner directly, but using the software, I find, is cleaner, leaves more of the line work intact... you know, the little details nobody will notice in the final picture.

  Shown left is a sample of the raw scanned image (from Crazykimchi #0103, "Ralph's Chick on a Scooter")

     Image > Mode > Grayscale

Click OK, as well as the "Don't show again" thingie.

7. ...by moving both the far right and far left marker towards the center until proper contrast   One darkens the lines, the other whites out the gray.

8. Oh, and delete the stray pixels picked up from the scanner.

1. Photoshop Actions

   The above sequence and other repetitious steps can be recorded as Actions and played over again with out going through the various steps.  Most any sequences, with the glaring exception of "Crate Art" can be saved and used over again.

You can assign a short cut key, or as I prefer, use the button mode to launch these Actions with a single click.

My favorites include:
Fill > Foreground (the current color swatch),
Expand selection 3 pixels > Fill > Foreground,
History, two steps back (Undo two steps back, bypassing Control + Z's one step limit),
And the preparations shown above and below.

You can download Photoshop Actions all over the net, as well.  Experiment with them and create your own.

	C. Mulitple Layer Prep for Tone or Color After clean up, the image is saved as a TIFF file.  The image is then saved again as a PSD file to color or tone using several layers following these steps: 1. From the Layers palette...
	2. Creat a copy of the Background layer.
	3. Delete the orginal Background layer. Create a new layer (Layer 1) and place it underneath the Background Copy layer. Set the Background Copy layer menu from "Normal" to "Multiply"
	4. Now you can tone or color underneath the Background Copy layer.  Rename the layers and add more layers as required.    There are various other ways to isolate the line work using Channels, Quick Mask, and such...  complicated methods developed for large commercial illustrations and such with ten and even hundreds of layers... This way's simple, it works.  It works for simple comics on slow old machines.

Back to Part 1 ( 229 KB)