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[Yoc]

Hi Gang,
OtherEric here was great enough to buy and scan a copy of Phantom Lady 19 for everyone.
He sent me the raw scans to edit for the future second edition of The Phantom Lady Archive v2.
*read vol.1 STILL available on this site - hurry now, operators are waiting...* 

Anyways, FOX really screwed the pooch on the print job for this one.   
The magenta plate is the only one that looks correct.  The cyan and yellow plates are both low and to the right while the black one is faded.

I know the black is about the easiest to fix (thanks Rammer!) but is there ANY WAY in Photoshop 7 to adjust the registration of an individual colour within a scan?  It took me 3hrs+ to hand correct just two pages!  There's gotta be a better way no?

This is a trick I've wanted to learn for ages but this book has finally got me asking the question.
The book is an expensive one filled with Lovely Matt Baker artwork!  It deserves to look it's best and I'm willing to go to the wall to make it look that way.

Even if it means passing it on to someone of superior skills than my own like Cimmerian32, Darwination, Jon, Ontology, etc.  But I'd really love to master this problem and finish with a book worthy of the top dollar OtherEric paid for it.

So... any Photoshop experts out there with some words of advice, plug-in pointers, etc etc?

-Yoc

[John C]

I don't do any real graphics work, so I'm thinking hypothetically, here.  But can't you separate the image out into component colors?  I'd recommend using a smaller number of colors overall, then (I don't know what the digital term would be) run a color separation kind of thing to get the component images.  You should be able to shift those around mechanically.

All right, I booted up Photoshop, and after the interminable splash screen...it's not perfect, but right off the bat, I notice that over where your layers live, there's a tab for "channels," which are the red, green, and blue components.  Now...ah-ha!  From Image/Mode, you can change the colorization to CMYK.  Then your channels should be close.

Good luck.  I suspect that's still not going to be the whole story.

[JVJ]

I send a lot of scans to Roy Thomas for Alter Ego and I've tried this with many different scans, folks. The problem doesn't lie in the CMYK flat areas, but in the browns and purples where the individual channels all seem to overlap. Once they overlap, you're sunk - as far as I've been able to tell. You can shift the areas that read only as Cyan or Magenta, but once you get a readout on more than one channel, the concept becomes extremely problematical. I'm using Photoshop CS3, and nothing in any of the upgrades has made this task more manageable. If someone else can tell us how to accomplish this, I, too, will be eternally grateful.

[OtherEric]

I obviously know nothing; I'm just honestly amazed that it's fixable at all.  I hope somebody has an idea to speed it up; I never intended to stick you with that much work when I sent you the book to work on.  Thanks again.

[Yoc]

Hi Eric!
Please - don't worry at all about it.
As I said - this is a special, rare and expensive book.  I'm willing to take as long as it's needed to fix it.  It's worth the extra work in my opinion.
I've done a couple more pages since my post.  It's not easy but I have learned a small trick to improve the look somewhat since I started.  It just might take me a lot longer to wrap it up for sharing.
Again, no worries on this, I'm making the job harder by demanding more from myself.  I easily could have just colour tweaked it and sent it out as is.  Heck, I might share a before and after when the day comes! 

[OtherEric]

Heck, I might share a before and after when the day comes! 

If you don't I probably will do it for you; the book doesn't look _too_ bad as is but most of the pages sure don't look _right_.  If you can fix it it deserves showing off.

[cimmerian32]

In PS7...

image/adjustments/separate colors/neutrals...  play with the levels for the individual colors (cyan/magenta/yellow/black)...  it takes experimentation, and sometimes, you need to get the full-on colors (I use RGB mode for this, by the way, not CMYK), fixed BEFORE you mess with the neutrals, but other times, just tweaking the neutrals will get you the desired results...  If you still can't get an acceptable image, send me the raws, and I'll be happy to work on it (but I think you will find it is fairly easy to get the neutrals set, although you shouldn't expect to do it all in one go, I usually use a series of slight neutral adjustments, saving as I go, as a single action).