Here is a good place to start http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/mythdpi.html about digital images, including scanning.
Your garden variety scanner has nothing on publishing-grade scanners who are almost self-aware and serve coffee while scanning :)
Friendly piece of advice: Don't store your scanner in the garden! Though I hear in Poland, they store all their computer gear in the garden so they can keep an eye on the road lest the German tanks come back :P
But Gorbacz is right: Don't compare some 20€ scanner you bought in a supermarket with the stuff professionals use. Or even one of the more expensive models you buy in an electronics store and the pro stuff.
It's like photo cameras. Take a cheap one for a hundred bucks. Snap a few pictures. Compare them to what a professional photographer will do with his 10000+ € camera.
I appreciate the input, I really do, but you all aren't answering my questions at all. I think I just wasn't clear before. My bad. I'd love to hear input from some 3PP folks. How do you get art into your product?
Thanks
Some of the artists I work with do their work completely digitally. Others work with pencil / paper and then scan with a professional-grade scanner.
Usually, they then get sent to me as a .tiff file. Sometimes as a PDF, although that's usually only for covers and not for graphics. I then insert that into the document using Adobe InDesign (or Acrobat in the case of PDF covers).
I'm not sure what more to say beyond that. I don't dictate to artists how they create their work - by hand & scan or by computer - as long as the graphic is high resolution and matches what I'm looking for.
I've seen the author/artist of "commissioned comic" drawing a large picture, cutting it in half and then scanning both halves separatly only to paste it back together in photoshop where he starts coloring it. :)
Most of the artists I work with do only the sketch on paper, then scan it and "paint" or "ink" it digitally.
jeremy.smith's answer is pretty much mine as well. Although I would never let an artist give me art in .PDF format.
I personally prefer art supplied to me digitally as a .PSD (photoshop document), .EPS (encapsulated post script) or .TIFF
The reason why is that I want the highest possible resolution on the art I'm working with.
By the way, even back in the day when artists did paint large pictures and they were sent to the publisher to be replicated for book covers and such (using equipment that was essentially a very large, very high-resolution camera) the artist got their original art returned to them. If publishers kept all of the art that they bought the rights to use in a publication the poor artists wouldn't have portfolios! ;)
I appreciate the input, I really do, but you all aren't answering my questions at all. I think I just wasn't clear before. My bad. I'd love to hear input from some 3PP folks. How do you get art into your product?
Thanks
Some of the artists I work with do their work completely digitally. Others work with pencil / paper and then scan with a professional-grade scanner.
Usually, they then get sent to me as a .tiff file. Sometimes as a PDF, although that's usually only for covers and not for graphics. I then insert that into the document using Adobe InDesign (or Acrobat in the case of PDF covers).
I'm not sure what more to say beyond that. I don't dictate to artists how they create their work - by hand & scan or by computer - as long as the graphic is high resolution and matches what I'm looking for.
I've done work for Chris Field and a Piece for Owen K C Stephens. I generally sketch out my work in pencil on a 8x10 sheet of paper, then scan it at 300 DPI. Then I Ink and color it using GIMP and save it with a .PNG format. When finished I send it as an EMail, what happens from there I can't tell you. Hope that helps.
Most of the artists that 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming works with work entirely in digital or mostly in digital formats. Some of them do their sketches/pencils traditionally, then scan the finished pencils to do digital inks (and colors when called for). Some of the artists do their art entirely digitally, from sketches to finished product. Only one of our artists still does his art entirely traditionally, with pencils, pens and paper, then scans the finished piece afterwards.
Here's a short (5 minutes) video made by one of our artists (Juan Diego Dianderas) showing a timelapse of his digital inking and coloring of a piece he did for us.
|
I do the intial pencil sketch and then add all the detail during the inking stage, both of which are traditional (actual pencil, professional quality ink pens, paper etc). I then scan the finished product using my scanner (high end, pro variety) and then do any additional work necessary in Photoshop. If color is needed, I do the color digitally in Photoshop.
Final art is always sent digitally as a hi res .tiff file (600 - 900 dpi for BW line art; 300 dpi for color)
Hope that helps
|
Most of the artists that 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming works with work entirely in digital or mostly in digital formats. Some of them do their sketches/pencils traditionally, then scan the finished pencils to do digital inks (and colors when called for). Some of the artists do their art entirely digitally, from sketches to finished product. Only one of our artists still does his art entirely traditionally, with pencils, pens and paper, then scans the finished piece afterwards.
Here's a short (5 minutes) video made by one of our artists (Juan Diego Dianderas) showing a timelapse of his digital inking and coloring of a piece he did for us.
That made me tired watching it.
|
I've done work for Chris Field and a Piece for Owen K C Stephens.
I then scan the finished product using my scanner (high end, pro variety) and then do any additional work necessary in Photoshop. If color is needed, I do the color digitally in Photoshop.
Nearly all the art Super Genius Games uses (including all the pieces from these two fine artists) comes to us in electronic format. That's actually covered in our contract. There have been a few cases where we have scanned in art ourselves, in which case we have used high-end desktop scanners.
I imagine that once the artwork is digitized and the text has been written out, it's all put into a a single PDF compilation via Adobe Indesign. It's the professional standard in published works.
I imagine that once the artwork is digitized and the text has been written out, it's all put into a a single PDF compilation via Adobe Indesign. It's the professional standard in published works.
Way to oversimplify the job of the layout artist. <grin>
I imagine that once the artwork is digitized and the text has been written out, it's all put into a a single PDF compilation via Adobe Indesign. It's the professional standard in published works.Way to oversimplify the job of the layout artist. <grin>
I am a layout artist. I do the layout of newspapers for a living.
It's intuitive and natural to me so I forget that it sometimes bears more explaining to the untrained.
I imagine that once the artwork is digitized and the text has been written out, it's all put into a a single PDF compilation via Adobe Indesign. It's the professional standard in published works.Way to oversimplify the job of the layout artist. <grin>I am a layout artist. I do the layout of newspapers for a living.
It's intuitive and natural to me so I forget that it sometimes bears more explaining to the untrained.
<laugh> I did that exact same job for well over a decade. Congrats on retaining a job in the newspaper industry! *knocks on wood*
I imagine that once the artwork is digitized and the text has been written out, it's all put into a a single PDF compilation via Adobe Indesign. It's the professional standard in published works.
That's it, though my wife (who does our layout) usually adds the step of cursing like a sailor somewhere in the process...
|
|
I imagine that once the artwork is digitized and the text has been written out, it's all put into a a single PDF compilation via Adobe Indesign. It's the professional standard in published works.That's it, though my wife (who does our layout) usually adds the step of cursing like a sailor somewhere in the process...
Ha ha! As a professional graphic artist for close to 20 years, I had to chuckle at that (even after all those years in the industry, I still ALSO find myself adding the step of cursing like a sailor now and then :)
The only time I've ever cursed like a sailor is when my revolving door of editor-and-chiefs simply didn't grasp the amount of work that goes into layout design. It's like a puzzle, everything had to fit just right, or it's a mess.
After completing the entire layout for an issue, and only having an hour left before deadline, I had the EiC call me to tell me to switch out the front page story for another and move the old one to another section.
Problem was our budget forces a specific limited page count. The new story wasn't big enough to fill the front page, the old story was too large to fit into the already full section, and everything would shift around both so that our colored ads would fall on grayscale pages and our lead stories (that were supposed to run off onto other pages where the ads were) no longer directed the reader to the ads.
If you move one little thing, EVERYTHING around it can shift dramatically.
Sadly, most of my coworkers and bosses never grasped that for some reason.
As such, I was forced to recreate the ENTIRE issue from scratch in just an hour and, though I made it work, I still think the initial design would have made for a better issue. But we just HAD to have that new story. *sighs in exasperation*
It's just as bad when you notice something that needs to change that will mess up the rest of the book and you simply don't want to spend the half-hour fixing the entire book... but you have to.
Expletives fly when I'm fighting myself over that. <laugh>
@Ravingdork - And then the EIC blames you when you miss deadline, right?
@Ravingdork - And then the EIC blames you when you miss deadline, right?
*shudders at bad memories*