Printing your own comic! I need help!

[RentAHero]

Alright everyone! Your good pal Elio needs a little professional help! Long story short, I finally after three weeks completed my first issue of a comic I’ve been dying to do. I have seventeen separate pages that are inked and all ready to go. Here is my question, how do I take all these pages and turn them into a 8.5 X 11 book, folded in half?

I understand the process, but there are a few things missing in my head that I was hoping someone really nice could answer for me!



My pages are on 14 x 17 Bristol, but I’ve only drawn on 10x15.
Now 1st, what dpi do I scan by, what should the size be?

2nd, In Photoshop, what is the document size I want to work with? How large should the pages be? When I make a document page to put in two scanned pages what size should that be so it prints out 8.5x11 with a .5 inch margin? When do I add text and screen tone? When I resized it, or when its still large?

3rd, to make sure printing is nice and clean what size do I print off of? Do I print them as jpg or Photoshop files?

Also, what are some other dos and don’t of this comic adventure? I’m very excited to finally put this together and give them away at conventions and my local comic books stores!



Thanks everyone in advance! You have no idea how much this means to me!

[Joseph Park]

The best advise I could give you is that to scan your pages with 600 dpi, after you done that... finish up the pages with the tones/colors, and lettering. Once you finish that, use the Photoshop to shrink your pages to a certain size so it can fit a 8.5 X 11 book. Save your book pages in pdf or tiff files, never in jpg.. Don't shrink your resolution, this will cause printing to go wrong. That's really all I know. Sorry I couldn't be more detailed.

Question.. is the book itself going to be 8.5 X 11 verticle or horizontal?

[Alex Deligiannis]

Your book, I assume, will end up being 8.5 X 5.5 inches. So, your files should scale to that size. Changing resolution won't screw printing up at all as long as you know what you are doing, but resolution is a tricky thing in that when you change the size dimesnions, you automatically affect resolution. (Real quick, here's the basic: a 10X10 page at 600 dpi is the exact same thing as a 20X20 page at 300 dpi, or a 5X5 page at 1200 dpi. It's all relative. Try it in photoshop and you'll see that nothing changes, not even the file size, as long as you keep the proportions relative. The "inches" are for your benefit only; the computer screen doesn't understand inches, because it works in pixels. So as long as your total pixels within the image remain the same, you are fine. Once you scale down your image to the print size you want, make sure to scale up your dpi in the exact same percentage ratio to keep the same resolution).

Ok, now back to your book. Once you are ready to assemble the files, you need to prepare them as follows (standard 8.5 X 11 books are usually 24 pages, so that's the example Im using).

Your front cover and back cover will be laid out in one 8.5 X 11 file, with the front cover on the RIGHT and the back cover on the LEFT, each at 8.5 X 5.5.

Inside front cover and inside back cover will be laid out in one 8.5 X 11 file, with the inside front on the LEFT and inside back on the RIGHT.

Then, you just count toward the middle, assembling page 1 and 24, 2 and 23, 3 and 22, 4 and 21, 5 and 20, 6 and 19, 7 and 18, 8 and 17, 9 and 16, 10 and 15, 11 and 14, and 12 and 13. All your EVEN pages will be on the LEFT of the file, and all your ODD pages on the right.

Keep in mind that page 1 and 24 will be single pages at the start and end of the book, so they should not be double-page spreads. Also be weary of the bleeds, meaning don't take any artwork within .25 inches of the edge or it will be trimmed off.

VERY RECOMMENDED: Make a mock-up. Take 7 sheets of paper and fold them in half, then number them and indicate which page is which. This way, you'll be able to catch layout errors before you assemble the files.

Hope this helped a bit!

[neil]

Hey congratualtions on finishing all those pages Elio! Alex has some good advice there; I just wanted to add that I found Jessica Abel's minicomics DIY guide very helpful when I tried this for the first time. (She's even totally right about using a bone paper folder!)

[Walter]

600 dpi is a good one. Printing will come out looking good with as low as 100 dpi so you can go as large as 60 x 90, if my math's right.

[rodguen]

Unless you want to make posters out of the pages, 300 dpi is good enough for printing, no?

I wish i could see the pages, since the little enquiring doodle is extremely promising.

r.

[Walter]

If you are going to make a poster of it for sale or just display then it'd be good to have the higher quality scans. or a to-size pic (BMP, EPS, AI) would help out the printer

[Alex Deligiannis]

Yes, 300 is great for printing (many printers print at 150dpi), and 100 is fair. But there is a huge difference between OUTPUTTING the image and bringing it in. When you bring it in, SCAN HIGH (I try to scan line art at 1200, NEVER lower than 600). Here's why: If you scan low, you're only bringing in part of the information to start with, so you're never going to get a fair representation of the original. By scanning high, you bring in everything, all the nuances of the line, the color gradients, etc. Once you scan it, you can lower the res to 600 or 300 or whatever, and still retain all the info you scanned (because the human eye only discerns relatively minimum resolutios anyway). Just keep in mind the size relations for final output!

Hope I explained that clearly!