Alright, now it's time to do the special effects. So I've reopened the file and I'm going to hit command y. So it previously didn't seem like a again. Actually, I toggle this on and off and Kathy, as you might be able to see a slight difference, especially in the red. Yeah, especially in the reds, but between the two previous but yeah, that's pretty close, not too much difference. All right.
Now, first thing we want to do is get rid of these extra alpha channels. So we're going to drag these down to the little trash icon. We still need the line our channel, so we're going to keep that now we're going to go into the actions And All right, well, first of all, if you're not if you weren't going to do any special effects at all, at this point, you would just use this action right here. Finish with no effects instead of doing the following steps, but we are going to do some special effects. So here we're going to do the FX setup action now I have that assigned to F 13. So I hit F 13.
And it's going to set up me for special effects. So now, do we have a layer here that's all of our renders are colors. And this layer here is for a line art. This is the layer holds is coming for what's called color holds, which I'll show you in a second. And FX, layers pretty much anything that'd be like, like a glow or something I'll show you both these in a second here. So first we're going to do some color holds.
Color holds is basically when you make a black line, no longer black. So I'm going to do that to the background here. First off, we just select the lines are going to want to turn it into a color. So let's zoom out a little bit at this point zoom back in Just kind of grab these a little bit here All right, so we got that now we just first go to color, I'm gonna do this dark gray. I think we're going to add some multiply make a little darker than that. There.
It's our initial color. So I'm going to leave that for majority the background. It also kind of helps push it pushing the background further back in the background makes it looks like there's it's even more distance than it was before. But now I want the lava and the smoke of the lava to be a color different than that. I went to the black here because I can just when I'm done with the selection, I can just deselect the black line now that they're different colors. So really I'm just trying to now surprise some more lines from the gray line that I have here.
Actually, again, that's black, I don't care. All right, he's like the black. First. Zoom in on grabbed a darker color of the smoke. Then in there, you do a little bit of multiply on that there and that will be the line for the smoke. Then a lava like that read a little bit a multiply, there we go.
That's the lava. Now when I was zooming in, I notice a few little specks where I kind of over colored on the you know, on these highlights here instead of going back my renders files, I'm just going to the background and it's kind of patch them up right here. Just for find some nice things I'm noticing as I go along Sure, select the right color. There we go. There you go. All right.
So now in the cold The other thing is, is we have a few glowing elements in the foreground like this. So I'm going to go ahead pick. Yeah. bluish color bear. And then also this here is supposed to be illuminated so pick like Yeah, it looks good. light orange there.
And, oh yeah, this little piece of sweat on him. forehead, multiply a few times. There we go. There I think we're done with the color holds. So now she's going to do a glow is this glows. Now there's a few things we could do here.
I'm gonna get like a nice deep orange for this one, I could just take a brush tool and go like this around it looks perfectly nice. Or, I'll show you a little trick you want to get something a little more uniform. I'm going to go to the lasso tool. And I'm going to change let's try feathering. 10 wants to guess Then if you make a selection, this is gonna be a test here. Hide it, and then you fill it in also has an edge to it like a feathered edge.
I think I want to be even more feathers than that. So instead of 10 we try 30. Just test. Oops. test that out again. Yeah, that's much better history there.
All right, so now I can put a glow. And unlike with the brush, I can make sure that the shape of it is a little bit more uniform. And it just helps give you a little bit more control over your glow. Then I'll just fill. There we go. And now we have a glow around there.
Now, just make sure when you're done that you go back into your lasso tool and change the feathering back down to zero because you're not going to want to make like a complicated selection that you want a nice sharp edge to and then realize, oh, shoot, I've got feathering on it. Alright, so that point, the colors are now done on this and it's ready to prepare this to send it off to your editor or client to be printed. Now there's certain specifications you need to, you know, meet in order for it to be to work for print. And this action here, this finish action will finalize This one. So I have that 215. Or you could just hit play there and I'll do that.
There we go. And one of the things is I think I might have just forgotten to do that is probably would have wanted to save beforehand, but that's fine. Save your effects before you do this step. But anyway, so let me show you exactly what it did in our PC for back and seeing why K is conferred is converted it to the color profile that we did originally. Of course, if your client has a specific color profile instead doing the custom when we did, you might want to plug in there or you would want to plug in their custom one but most the time Most clients, they don't give you a specific color profile. So using the one, the custom one that I had mentioned earlier is probably your better bet.
All right, but I'm going to show you one of the main things here. This is called color trapping, because when in print, and each of these cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, those are basically different plates that go on separately in the printing process. And so sometimes the ink gets wet, or the ink is wet and the paper can get a little bit you know, gets wet and may shift a little bit and so the plates might have slight out of alignment. And so you want to make sure that you don't get to too much weird things happening in print. So that's what trapping this form. So here if I turn off the black letter, you can see what's underneath it.
The flat color underneath the line. First of all, we'll make it so that the blacks are richer. But you'll notice that the flat color is slightly smaller than the blacks so that way if as I was describing, there's a shift, this little flat color won't come out and you see it. So that's pretty much the main thing you have to think about when getting ready for print. So now this is a print ready file. I'm going to save as I'm going to save it as a TIFF.
I'm putting my TIFF file so this is where I'm going to be putting the files that you'll be sending to your editor or client or whom whomever it save the main things to mark is this the ZW compression then I need to do interleaved and Macintosh. I don't think it really matters. If you do Macintosh or PC. But I've just haven't had any problem with either by normally just do Macintosh as my default and hit OK. And that's ready to send off to be printed. Now another thing you might want to do, I have an extra here for low res JPEG is before you send them the high res JPEG which, you know, it's going to be, you know, kind of high in memory. You probably want to send your editor a low res thing so they can see it, make sure there's no problems with it.
So here's that action, you just play that and it will reduce the size, change it and change it into a JPEG that you can email them and I'm going to quit Photoshop here for a second. Okay, and it saved JPEG to your desktop. So you can just pop that into an email sent to your editor. And yeah, that's it. So, from that you should know now know how to be able to take some black and white comic book artwork and transform it into a finished color piece that's ready for print.