Color Conundrums
September 19, 2005
I don't think I'm really being fair to Sunburst in this one.
She's not supposed to be the oblivious one, but I suppose even
heroes can have an off day. I'm having some trouble in
capturing Sunburst's voice properly. She's generally one of the
more sarcastic of the cast, but I don't want her sounding just
like Knightbane.
Lately I've been thinking about color, and how to use it. My
first problem is the discovery of how much difference your
monitor makes. I was showing Stickopolis to a friend on their
computer, and I was shocked at how different it looked.
Everything was darker, and a lot of the comics had this
terrible greenish cast to them. Bleah.
The problem stems from the fact that my laptop is generally very
bright, so I tend to pick darker color that show up clearly for
me. The problem is that most CRT's are much darker, so the
colors come out very dark and muddy. I'm not sure how to
address this properly. PNG files come with a gamma adjust which
is supposed to address just this problem, but it seems Photoshop
doesn't implement that feature.
Ideally everyone would just buy an LCD screen and then the comic
would display correctly. Short of that, I am starting to move
the characters to a lighter palette. I'm trying to find a
balance where things don't look washed out to me and are
viewable on a darker display. This will be an ongoing process,
so bear with me.
My second problem is that the colors I use tend to be rather
random, and don't do a good job of setting mood or enhancing any
part of the scene. But that's a topic for another time.
The next comic will likely be showing up mid-week, as I will be
out-of-town all this weekend. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS
feed so you can be the first to know when a comic is up.
-Jem
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