Black Pages Editing Help

[meppi]

As you probably already know already, I really hate editing pages with black backgrounds.

The look great once they are all cleaned up, but the big problem is that if the original magazine is quite old then the black pages can look awful.

Parts of the page might look more like grey instead of black.

This can be fixed by copying a cleaned up part of the page and the "paint in" all the discoloration between all the letters and sentences.

The big problem is that this takes a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge amount of time. Sometimes up to 2 hours to do one single page perfectly.

This has 2 negative effect.

First off, it takes much much longer to release a magazine, and secondly I tend to get burned out editing these pages since they are so incredibly hard to do.

So I'm going to be going for a new way of editing these pages.

But only on the ones that have a full black background with no background images beneath the text, sine that won't work on those.

I'm going to start using the paint bucket tool and paint those backgrounds black.

I've just tested this and they look about perfect with just one mouse click.

The only thing I can find is that when there is any artwork on the page, the black seems to "bleed" into it which makes it very obvious that there's something wrong on the page.

So for those pages I will fist fill the background with black and then cope the artwork from the original copy, cutting as close to the edges as possible, and put this version into the filled page, where I can manually adjust it if necessary.

Why post all this?

Well perhaps I'm not the only one with this dilemma, so my idea on this could be helpful to others, or someone has a better idea of fixing the problem and I can learn a thing or two from him/her.

I normally am against using the bucket tool to fill in the background of pages, as you tend to lose the magazine feeling.

Especially on colored pages, but also on white ones sometimes.

But I feel the black ones area bit of an exception in this case.

If anyone feels different about this, feel free to mention it.

[meppi]

Allright, I've been doing quite a few test runs and have come to the conclusion that I'm going ahead with this method for editing black pages and big black text boxes.

They look so much better than when I adjust them by hand.

When a page has a big background image on a black background, then for the most part I won't be able to use this technique as the contrast between the background image and the black background would huge and won't look natural at all.

But when I'm dealing with black pages that have images pasted on top, the I will use the technique of first tracing the edges of the particular screenshots or artwork, copy them, then fill the black background with the bucket fill tool at a tolerance that looks just right and after all that past the original images back on top.

That way they won't look like they've been partially "eaten" by the background.

Sounds complicated, but the result looks extremely good I think.

Here's an example page where you can see the difference for yourself:

The top half of the page is as it was released before, and the bottom one is after the new method was implemented.

I'm already half way through my previous scans which I thought would be my final editions of those magazines, but as you might have come to know by now, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so if I'm not happy with my own result, I will find a way to improve upon it.

I hope you don't mind that you might have to download yet another "latest" version of my magazines....

But I think it's a small price to pay for what you get in the end.

The only thing now is a way to set these versions apart from the old ones...

I might add a small label or something on the thank you page at the end.

[triverse]

First of all, thank you so much for the awesome work you put into your releases (I wish I had the patience to do that much detail work, may when I get a bunch up but for now, I am just interested in getting them up and in better condition).

As far as your situation, what about adding a version number or something, say, ver 1.0 then when you rescan it and touch up the backgrounds and such, ver 2.0? That would let people know which version they have, and which version is available. You could detail in the release what was done to make it better like editing the colors of the backgrounds and such.

Thanks for the hard work.