Gravity's Scanning Recipe- Many aspiring artists ask about how I get my scans so smooth. Here's the process I use for the best results. Begin scanning as you would if your comic was going to be printed. To do this, scan your inked Black and White art in at 600dpi, as a Black and White Documnet or Bitmap (NOT GRAYSCALE OR COLOR!)- If your art doesn't fit on your scanner, simply scan it in halves and piece it together in a Photoshop type program. Once in Photoshop, do any cleanup that may be needed. Change the mode to Grayscale, and now reduce your DPI to 300 in the image size settings. Now for actual print, you'll be thinking in inches. After you've pieced your halves together using layers, flatten those babys and now get ready to resize. Drop a blue guideline at the 6.5 inch mark. Line up your strip, which should be about 13inches wide, and then resize your strip down to fit 6.5inches wide. Select around the strip, copy it, open a new file and paste it in, and then Save it as a 300dpi Tiff file with LZW Compression. You can then take that tiff file into any lettering program you want, and export it back out just the same for printing purposes.

Now for the web- For the web, you'll need to think in PIXELS! Not inches!- Let's say you have a 300dpi lettered Jpeg. Open it in Photoshop, and go to IMAGE SIZE and take a look at your options. At 300pdi, the image is most likely way too big to fit on a screen and the file size is too big for the net, so what you want to do is drop that DPI down to 96DPI from your 300DPI file. Now, pay no attention to the inched section, only look at the PIXEL SIZE boxes. You have toi remember that most people choose either an 800x600 Pixel resolution on their monitor or 1024x768, so you want to be sure the hieght and width of your picture in pixels will fit right within those. Our strip is generally about 652Pixels in width, which will show fine on both monitor resolutions at a legible size. You can tinker with the size till you get what you want. A good idea is to set your picture size in Photoshop to the "ACTUAL PIXELS" setting and see what it looks like on your screen.

Hope that helps! It sounds complicted, but it's an easy process once learned. If all these DPI and Photoshop terms bogle you it might be a good idea to take a graphic arts course, or find some tutorials online. Sooner or later you'll have to be dealing with these terms yourself or paying someone else alot of money to do it for you!- You can e-mail me any questions at yirmumah@hotmail.com