Puttin' it together

[Amtekoth]

I'm doing this end of things for the first time and I'm looking for a tutorial that has all the details on how to put the comic book together for the printer. Do not assume that I know squat about this process.

I'm using Photoshop CS and Illustrator CS. I've got full color art. I've got lettering.

I know how to do this for online (I just copy everything in the AI layers and paste it over the art in PS), but I know things are more complicated for print.

Help!

Pretty please!

Ed

[Jason Arthur]

First thing you should do is talk to the printer and see how they prefer the files.

9 times out of 10 they're good with 400 dpi tif files (which you can make right out of Illustrator). Just assemble the whole thing in Illustrator and choose FILE>EXPORT and then choose tif. Use LZW compression (it doesn't effect the quality at all) and make sure you're set to Either CMYK, RGB or GREYSCALE... whichever the printer has requested (usually CMYK).

-- J

[Amtekoth]

Jason, Jason, you sillyhead.

I'm an old guy, which means you have to assume I'm retarded.

Back up a leeetle bit.

How do I "just assemble the whole thing in Illustrator"?

:confused:

Ed

[Jason Arthur]

Same way you letter in Illustrator.

You have a template (I assume) which has a lettering layer, balloons layer, art layer and a guides layer (some people have other layers on their template, but I just use those).

Place your artwork (high res this time) into the art layer of your template. Lock that layer.

If you're having issues with your guidelines printing up on your final file then simply double-click the guides layer and set it to "DO NOT PRINT" (it says something like that, I forget).

Make sure your overprints are set up correctly (if you have Illustrator CS or above there's an option to have Illustrator automatically do your overprint blacks for you).

After that you just need to follow my previous instructions for making the tif file.

-- J