Book Stuff! Color Correction (Patreon)

I couldn't think of a more clever title.

I've been working first and foremost on getting the Softies book ready for print over the past couple months. Here's a brief explanation of one of the largest parts of what that work actually is!

RGB vs CMYK 

You may already know the difference between CMYK and RGB color spaces, in which case, great! You’re already smarter than me. For anyone else, CMYK and RGB are two different ways of describing color. 

• On screens, color is created by combining three different colored lights-- red, green, and blue, so, when an image is designed for that, it’s in an “RGB” color space.
• In print, color is created by mixing four colors of ink— cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The black ink is identified as “key” for reasons I don’t know, so images designed this way are in a “CMYK” color space.

 Here's a cool picture from Wikipedia 

You might see where this is going. Softies was originally created and published digitally, so every single page was in RGB, but to print them in a book, they need to be in CMYK. Images can be automatically converted from RGB to CMYK, but getting it to look right takes tweaking afterwards.

BLACK

One huge difference between RGB and CMYK is that, in RGB, there is exactly one, specific color that represents black. #000000 is black, and black is #000000. CMYK printing can achieve black a few different ways, though. If you use only "key" ink, the result will be a black with no other colors-- but you can also achieve black through mixing the three colors in varying proportions. 

In CMYK, “True black”, the black created with just black ink, works for text, to keep it clean and readable even if any of the different ink colors get out of line with eachother. “Rich black”, which uses a heavy amount of CMY with some K, is visually nicer for art. I make a comic, which has both, so, the pages had to be adjusted to use both. :/

These colors look different on screen, but both will print black.

Some colors also just turn out to use too much “K” when converted into CMYK, which I’m told can make the image murky. Here’s a look at what a page looks like when I ask Photoshop to only display what would be printed as the “key”. The darker the image, the more "key" ink it's going to be made of.

To get from those middle-grays on the left to the light grays and whites on the right, some characters and locations needed new palettes that would create roughly the same color but with a different mixture of pigments. Kay and Scrabatha both got their palettes manually changed to achieve nicer-printing rich browns that relied more on the color pigments and less on the key black ink.

So, after the images were converted to CMYK, I needed to

• Change text to True Black
• Change black line art to Rich Black
• Recolor any characters who have new palettes
• Recolor any incidental elements that are too Reliant on K
• Check that nothing in the page's readability has been thrown off by the changes

If this seems dry and complicated, well uh, it is! I'm thankful to the folks at Iron Circus who actually know how to print books for their guidance on how to do all this stuff that would've been pretty impossible for me to figure out on my own.