What's wrong with most colorist?

[edhopper]

A word to all colorists: What you see on your computer screen is not what is printed. It's radiant vs reflective light. Either re-calibrate your screen to approximated the printed page or figure out how bright to color it so it's not murky when printed.
90% of today's books are too dark. It seems no one in the business understands the basics of printing. Here's some tips, black gains in printing and printed red has black ink as a component.
Half the books I read look like they take place all at night.
I don't know why artist aren't up in arms the way their work is obscured.
The PC is a great tool, but your end product is printed. It has to look good on the page, not just on youe screen.

[dancj]

When Laura Depuy (sp?) was colouring Bryanh Hitch + Mark Waid's JLA, she was really angry because they used cheaper paper than they said they would. She had to adjust her colouring to look righ ton the cheaper paper.

That's pretty smart (and I suspect fairly rare)

[howyadoin]

I'd say this really applies to Captain America these days. I love the book, but goddamn, it's hard to figure out what's going on sometimes.

[Mark Wallace]

A word to all colorists: What you see on your computer screen is not what is printed. It's radiant vs reflective light. Either re-calibrate your screen to approximated the printed page or figure out how bright to color it so it's not murky when printed.
90% of today's books are too dark. It seems no one in the business understands the basics of printing. Here's some tips, black gains in printing and printed red has black ink as a component.
Half the books I read look like they take place all at night.
I don't know why artist aren't up in arms the way their work is obscured.
The PC is a great tool, but your end product is printed. It has to look good on the page, not just on youe screen.

There's a whole science to this; professionals in the printing industry take years to fully learn the craft involved in colour-matching, etc; but, since so much of the computer colouring is done by fanboys-turned-pros-because-they're-buddies-of-the-editors, you can expect that level of quality to be as lacking as the writing skills of most fanboys-turned-writer-because-they're-buddies-of-the-editors.

A "Roy Thomas" comic-colouring syndrome. Who'd have expected that, ten years ago?

[howyadoin]

There's a whole science to this; professionals in the printing industry take years to fully learn the craft involved in colour-matching, etc...

The basics of it are pretty simple, though. I learned to colour-correct photos by the numbers in one day.

And if the comics are being laid out in InDesign, you can use the Separations Preview to look at the seps and - more importantly - the ink limits.

[edhopper]

I am a commercial artist and I learned this stuff too.
There should also be an Art Director at the Comic companies to oversee this stuff. But they don't. If you look at all the previews on this and other comics websites it is apparent that the colorist are coloring for the screen and not the printed page.
You would think that after a dozen or so issues of their work coming out murky and dark they would get a clue.

Captain American is one, Daredevil is another.
Gotham Central was about the worst example I've seen.

[Bright-Raven]

There should also be an Art Director at the Comic companies to oversee this stuff. But they don't.

Pardon? Yes, they do have Art Directors at all the major publishers. However, their job is not to bycheck evey last page that comes in for color nuances. They may or may not set the guidelines the editors are supposed to follow and relay to colorists so that the colorists know the variances required between paper stock, printer definitions, and other pertinent information (such information is usually being supplied by the printers specifically and is coordinated accordingly). If that information isn't relayed, is inaccurate, or is ignored at any level, then you're going to get a "garbage in, garbage out" result.

Certainly the colorist should be requesting all such information just to cover their own backsides and to operate within the set parameters. But it's not their sole responsibility to have that information at hand. It's the publisher's responsibility ultimately - they're the ones publishing the book. They ought to know what the hell they want and that ought to have print guides at the right levels so that both the publisher and printer know what the desired results are supposed to be before you go to mass production, y'know! Sheesh!

Are the books too dark? Yes, a lot of them are (Mark Wallace is a bit excessive in his estimation, but certainly an overabundance of titles do suffer from some level of color saturation). But is that solely the colorist's fault, or is that the fault of the entire creative team?

Consider some of the horrendous handcrafted inking and computer inking we have today also. Much of today's art often lacks the proper light and shadow effects in the line art itself - if the penciler was too lazy to do it, then the inker is supposed to compensate. Nowadays, many inkers just slap-dash the work or even digitally ink the work - much of it incomplete or inaccurate - and expect the colorists to create the light sources in computer, often times resulting in false lighting effects that work against the natural line art. This too makes a lot of books too dark, because the colorists are trying to create shadow effects to create the depth perception that the penciler and / or inker should have put in to begin with!

So don't lay the blame at any one party's feet. Certainly colorists have a certain amount of responsibility here, but so does everyone else involved in the art from production to printer.

[edhopper]

Bright-Raven,
I worded that poorly, When I said "they don't", I meant the Art Directors don't do their jobs. Not that the companies don't have them.
You first say that Art Directors can't go over every page. (Yes the can, it's called proof-reading and it's what editors are suppose to do) and then you say it's not the colorist responsibility, it's the publisher. It's both
We are not talking about one page's color nuance. We are talking about whole issues and entire series that have problems.
Your right about expectation of the colorist fixing art problems. This always ends up a mess, especially with the digitally inked books.
I think we are in agreement that this is a problem through out the industry that the industry as a whole should address.

[Agentum]

I'm not fond of comics with black around the panels, use the classic white paper instead, and save some black color.

[dancj]

You'd have thought in this day and age that they'd be able to do the compensating in the printing process so that the printed versions look pretty much the same as they do on screen - or even better, get the art package to have a mode were it simulates a particular paper quality and printing process so that they artist can see what is going to print

[Bright-Raven]

Dan:

The technology exists, it's just too costly for the common layperson (i.e. computer colorist) to afford.

Ed:

You first say that Art Directors can't go over every page. (Yes the can, it's called proof-reading and it's what editors are suppose to do)

The A.D. is *not* an editor. The Art Director's job revolves around design work and what art will be selected or created separately for the project campaigns for advertising, the licensing of the characters, packaging for licensed products, and the like.


The responsibilities you're talking about are more the Production Manager or Studio Manager's job.

And again, do you really think any one person is going to review 2,500 to 4,000 pages of materials every month consistently and accurately?

I can't say for certain, but from what I understand, part of the problem may be that the publishers have bypassed the mock up and just send the discs to the printers without a printed version at the proper values to save costs. If a printer has no printed guideline for comparative value, they're going to assume the data is correct on disc and go with it. Businesses are tremendously stupid when it comes to cutting costs and will often remove quality controls to lower production costs, so I wouldn't rule the possibility out.

[edhopper]

Bright raven,
I stand corrected, you are right about the Prod. Manager.
You are also right about everything being done on disk and sent PC to PC.
I don't think the problem is looking at 2500 pages a month. If my complaint was that a few pages were too dark, your statement would apply.
But it is entire runs of issue that have this problem. You would think that after years of books being to dark, some one in the production line would try to fix it.

I have another good example.
If any of you have the new Trials of Shazam book with the incredible Howard Porter art work;
Compare the printed book to the PC images on this page,
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=82534

Click on the images for a lager pic.

It really is a shame that we don't see how wonderful the art is.

[howyadoin]

You'd have thought in this day and age that they'd be able to do the compensating in the printing process so that the printed versions look pretty much the same as they do on screen - or even better, get the art package to have a mode were it simulates a particular paper quality and printing process so that they artist can see what is going to print

All those things are readily available, and included in Adobe Creative Suite - InDesign can show you the individual seps, plus the areas with the highest ink density and whether those areas are too saturated or not. And in Acrobat, you can preview a page and simulate the appearance of the paper you're printing on.

Alternately, colourists could learn to adjust colour the way everyone else in the print industry has been doing it for years - by the numbers. It's a proven method, and it generally works pretty well.

Or, the monitors can be adjusted to reflect how the pages will print. That's not all that complicated, either:

http://www.adcom.bg/Web/Colorvision/.../SpyderPRO.htm

[howyadoin]

I have another good example.
If any of you have the new Trials of Shazam book with the incredible Howard Porter art work;
Compare the printed book to the PC images on this page,
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=82534

Click on the images for a lager pic.

It really is a shame that we don't see how wonderful the art is.

How you're seeing it depends entirely on how your monitor is calibrated, though. I don't have the book, but onscreen it looks great to me.

[Bright-Raven]

Pretty much everything Howy's commented on solutions to the problem are in fact common sense answers. Especially working by the number codes that have been in use by the printers since the dot matrix days.

********

If my complaint was that a few pages were too dark, your statement would apply.
But it is entire runs of issue that have this problem. You would think that after years of books being to dark, some one in the production line would try to fix it.

Let me tell you a little story, Ed.

Back in 1995, I worked for my local newspaper as a layout technician and darkroom assistant. I would regularly read through articles as I was pasting them up on the boards to be sent to printer, and without exception I would find countless typographical, grammatical and spelling errors in EVERY article.

Being a PROFESSIONAL, I considered this unacceptable and would always go back to the writers, show them their mistakes and tell them to fix it and bring back the corrected copy. This pissed everyone off - it pissed the writers off because I was showing them up. It pissed the editors off because it showed their negligence and incompetence. It pissed off the Big Bosses because this always slowed production down.

So after five weeks on the job, I was summarily fired. Because I wanted a product worth producing. Because I saw the errors and simply wanted it done right.

So, Ed, do you really think anyone is going to take it upon themselves to "fix" this until the "big bosses" actually have the werewithal to order it done, or do you think they've learned from my experience just to let the product be shit?