Tin Lizard Productions

Step 5

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Laser beam and lighting effects are far tougher than they should concievably be. Here's what I needed to do:

1) Create a duplicate of the beam layer and use a Gaussian blur to fuzz the edges. Transparency: Normal.

2) Create another duplicate of the beam layer and use either the feather function or the internal glow effect to get that nice whitish internal light. Transparency normal.

3) Create a duplicate of the line art, cut it down to just the blacks, and cut it so it just covers the area behind the glow. I call this a "blackout". The reason behind this is when I use the three color printing to saturate the black areas (see below), laying a glow over it tends to wash out the blacks and add color into the black areas. This looks really bad. So I must lay in just raw black to prevent this blanching from happening, but do it behind the glow effect.

4) Erase the glow away from front figures (i.e., the front Connie's arm)

Then I make sure the blacks are all saturated. This bit is invisible until printing.

The CMYK color palette is geared towards a four-color printing process: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. If you just use black ink to fill in blacks, they look pale. You need to lay in a percentage of the other colors over the black to get nice, saturated dark areas. I use 60%/40%/40%/100% of each of the colors to do this saturation.

But the trick is... you have to keep the other colors from the very edges of the line art, otherwise you'll get a halo effect if the printing plates shift. So here's what I do:

1) I turn off all color layers, so I'm just down to the line art.

2) I use the Channels function to duplicate the black channel on that layer.

3) I turn the color layers back on. I flatten everything down until I get to the "blackout" layer and laser glow bits.

4) I use the duplicate black channel and the Load Selection function to select only the black pixels of the line art only.

5) I contract the selection by 2 pixels.

6) I fill 60/40/40/100 over the top of the art.

7) I flatten down the rest of the layers.

It seems like an unnecessary pain, but it looks damn good when done.

This is what I sent back to Chris.

On to Step 6.