Added 1 new A* page:While working on a watercolor commission for a reader over the weekend (yeah I need to add commission info to the 'store' page at some point...basically it's $25/hour, and you have to be patient with me since I may have only an hour so to work on a single commission per week—and that's kind of in a good week : P—but I do get 'em done eventually, and anyway just email me at smbhax@gmail.com if you have an idea of something you'd like to have me paint for you), I realized that my usual way of preparing the scan of a watercolor image—for the daily A* pages, I mean—wasn't quite as accurate a representation of the painting as maybe could be. So I played around in Photoshop a bit and came up with a new processing process for them, which you can see in today's page (and the previous day's page, since I still had the layers for that one laying around so I was able to go back and give it the same process). Hopefully it looks smoother and a little easier to look at. They *will* take about 30% longer to download this way, though, because in order to preserve the detail at these lower contrast settings, I have to save them at a higher fidelity, so the image file sizes are heftier.
Here's a comparison: the result of the old process (top) vs the new process (bottom) on today's page:
The bottom (new process) one looks a lot more like the actual painting looks in real life, preserves more of the natural gradient and so forth, and also happens to look nicer than the more processed (top, old) version—I think! Anyway if I don't change my mind about this in the next week or so I'll have to go back and reprocess all the old watercolor pages this way (although I won't be able to lighten them up really, just un-noisify them), just like I did uh just a few months ago when I sharpened things up vs the old, old process. : P
(The technical Photoshop stuff: the old process started with a .75 gamma reduction on the scan, and ended with an Sharpen More faded to 88% opacity; the new process omits any gamma changes, and uses Unsharp Mask 500%, Radius 0.3, Threshold 10: this yields a reduced but more natural contrast (without the gamma, I mean), and prevents the sharpening from making a whole lot of noise out of the grain of the watercolor paper.)
(Silly Photoshop stuff: in my ancient Photoshop 4, when using Unsharp Mask in a macro, you actually have to bump the Radius up 0.1 over your real value, because some little bug causes the batch to run the Mask at 0.1 less Radius than what you entered : P; and I'm saving these at jpeg compression setting "8" (in the "Maximum" range), vs the old setting of "6" (in the "High" range); I forget what 6 works out to being in modern Photoshop jpeg percentages, and I'll have to figure out what "8" approximately equates to whenever I go and use my newer version of Photoshop to batch process all the old pages into this new gamma/sharpening scheme.)
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Not directly related, but just confirming, as I mentioned in a few previous blog entries, that starting with today's page I've bumped up the starting price for the auctions of these daily pages (link at the lower left corner of the comic image) to $12.99 to help cover the increased costs of art supplies and a lot of the other stuff involved, vs what they were when I started auctioning these years ago at $9.99—it was getting close to not even breaking even just in terms of the materials involved selling 'em at that price anymore, so obviously that was a little silly. : P A big thanks to everyone who has bid on my little paintings, and I hope you'll consider doing so again if you see one you like. : )
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