[asa]1581809921[/asa]So I bought a copy of “Hi-Fi Color from Comics,” in the hopes that my newly rediscovered suckiness at drawing with a graphics tablet would benefit from some pointers. And it is indeed an excellent book, by Brian and Kristy Miller. Remember all those wonderful “Strangers in Paradise” covers? That was Brian.
The book doesn’t go in much about graphic tablets per se – I’m just going to have to get the first few thousand crappy drawings out of the way so I can start to learn how to use this thing right – but it does give you some excellent tips on coloring lineart in Photoshop. Tips on organizing your work, using layers and channels to best effect, painting with light, all sorts of cool tricks. And it comes with a CD full of scripts and brushes and sample artwork (Terry Moore art to play with! Woo hoo!) that will have me occupied for weeks. Except…
In the beginning of the book it stresses the importance of calibrating your monitor to get the best duplication of what you’ll see when you print. And I tried that, using their suggestions. And I hosed my monitor royally. I suspect it’s because I have the monitor settings as well as NVIDIA’s color management going, and changing one around screwed up the other. Only I couldn’t get back to where I was, even with multiple Resets, and everything I tried made it worse… Also tried Adobe’s Gamma calibrator, which added a third layer to the mess.
After an hour or so of tweaking back and forth, my computer doesn’t look quite so much like it’s on Ecstasy any more, and I can make out subdued colors, so I’m going to stop there.
All of which means: if my artwork has a glaring, garish color quality from now on, it’s, it’s… a new school of art! Yeah! The F-ed-Up-Gamma school. Very popular with the college students, and people who just close their eyes and poke at the Contrast button.