Saturday Deep Dive: Color flatting
Saturday, December 21, 2013 at 10:07AM Today's dive into the archive goes really deep -- 2008 deep -- for a post about the process of filling your line work with flat colors ("flatting").
If you digitally color your comic like me, then you know that "flatting" is one of the most boring and time-consuming steps. This is the process of filling all your line work with flat colors. Photoshop has a magic wand tool that should, in principle, make coloring easy since you can select closed areas of your line work to color. The problem is that you want all the colors to be right up against each other underneath the line art with no white showing (this is called trapping). This is essential for making sure your comic prints correctly. You can mess around with the expand selection option, but this is time consuming and not very precise. Fortunately, I've found a free Photoshop plug-in that does this all for you. It saves me a ton of time and is one of the main reasons I'm able to update a full-color comic three times a week. This was originally discussed in a Questionable Content tutorial.