The following was addressed to Mike Cannon, who runs the "horror" group... but I decided to share it here.
Okay, so, in addition to this "Agata" person (fake name, her real name is "Gloria"), the other day this "Wong" guy (who looks like he can't be more than 15-- typical smart-ass teenager) posts in my "POE IN PROGRESS" thread. He joined your horror group, hadn't posted a single comment, and out of the blue, posts in MY thread, just to tell me everything I'm doing is wrong.
Says he prefers the art in B&W, as color makes the linework go "fuzzy". Now, if he'd been around more than a couple of months, he might have known my opinion is that about 98% of the underage halfwits who do Photoshop coloring have NO IDEA what they're doing, do what Dick Ayers called "overdone" coloring, with excessive amounts of brightness, DARKNESS, SHADOWS, and airbrushed renderings all over every square inch of everything, to the point where you can't even SEE the linework!!! It's an INSULT to the artists' work, and appears to be saying, "HEY! Look at ME! LOOK AT ME!!!!"
I don't do that.
In fact, on this particular story (the Malagola "Amontillado"), more than any previous story I worked on, I pondered for DAYS whether or not I should add color, as my goal is to "enhance", not "overpower". Since I'd already decided to color ALL the Brazillian comics, I decided to take a crack at it. BOY was I glad I did. If you look at the story AT the blog-- on a full-size computer screen-- you can SEE every single detail of the linework. Not one bit of it was "obliterated".
I also have seen ONE instance where lines actually did get "blurry"-- it was on the Tom Sutton "Red Death". A solid RED color somehow made the black lines go fuzzy. My way to fix this was simple-- I saved the final reduced image at the HIGHEST quality. That did it, nice and SHARP. No loss of detail at all.
Then he starts wondering if I used "software" to clean up the yellowed scans to make them white. And "if not", he suggests I use a particular software I've never heard of. Says "with one click" it does it "automatically".
I DON'T DO ANYTHING "automatically".
Something somebody at Kirby-L explained to me was "levels". You click on an area that should be white, and every single part of the page, it removes yellow. But it is VERY tricky, and takes a delicate hand to know where to touch it, and how much adjustment to make.
There's an "auto-levels" button. I never use it. IT'S CRAP.
It reminds me of this "option" Blogger added WITHOUT telling anybody. 'Auto-enhance". When you upload images, it "enhances" them for you-- automatically. Now, imagine this. A person spends minutes-- or hours-- OR DAYS (!!!!!) adjusting an image to get it "just-- right". And this "auto" feature FUCKS IT UP for you. FUCKS it!!!!! And the ASSHOLES who added this feature left it TURNED ON by default.
Somebody in the Google Blogger "help" message boards had to explain to everybody else where to FIND the options, so you could SHUT THE GOD-DAMNED THING OFF.
Fortunately, I only had 2 weeks of images uploaded that needed to be RE-uploaded.
Anyway, this "Wong" guy, to me, must be an IDIOT. The very first thing he says, he's trying to undercut ALL the MONTHS of love and hard work I'm pouring into this project, he talks to me as if I DON'T KNOW what I'm doing, and on top of everything else, suggests I use something that will clean the pages "automatically".
If he had ever worked with 55-year-old scans, he would KNOW you CAN NOT "clean" them with "one click", NO MATTER WHAT the hell kind of software you've got.
I mean, geez... it took 2 WHOLE DAYS for me to clean that last Jayme Cortez PAINTING!
I pondered for a whole day whether to engage this "Wong" guy in conversation. Then I decided... NAAAAH! And I just hit the "BLOCK" button. He doesn't DESERVE to see updates on my project.
