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  Harder LightNov 28, 2013 1:37 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:You can blame the cooked, aliased lines in today's page on Photoshop's "Hard Light" blending mode, which I ended up going back to in order to punch up the colors and contrast. I (over)used Hard Light when I first started using digital color in the comic (that was page 116 of episode 19); it made the scanned pencil lines I was using at the time even more jagged than they already were; now that I'm using ink, that effect isn't quite so bad.
 
The other main difference this time was that instead of blending the color image with *itself* in Hard Light mode, this time I used a grayscale version (or more specifically, the result of a Hue/Saturation layer set to full desaturate and Hue blending mode) of the image as the Hard Light--this blew out the colors far less than using a color copy, but still heightened the value contrasts. You can see that gray "luminance" mixing layer on the left below:
 
Image
 
The image on the right is what you get if you perform the Hard Light blending *before* scaling the image down from the high-res original to web size; it looks a lot smoother, but it loses what is to me one of the charms of Hard Light blends, which is that the edges of black lines get loaded with high-saturation color; when you compare the two, the pre-blended version there looks pale and fishy around the lines, whereas the pre-shrunk, then Hard Lit version I went with for the final image has a sort of red glow around the admittedly more jagged lines. In a way, though, a little pixelization fits the comic, if you ask me, what with its hard digital origins and stubborn web-only format.
 
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Yeah yeah, blah blah blah. I'm going to be occupied with family Thanksgiving festivities tomorrow--well, today (Thursday)--so I won't have a new page for you then, but I'll be back at the drawing board on Friday (and probably finish up that page in the wee hours of Saturday, as usual : P). Have a nice Turkey Day, or just a nice Thursday! Hopefully I'll pull off the mashed yams okay. : P
 
 
 
 
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