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I give my apologies for how “grainy” this one looks, it’s just one.

  • Ahdok@ttrpg.networkOP
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    1 year ago

    Often when I post-process my scans, I have a lot of debris to clean up out of my scanner. This comes with the territory of pencil work - I’m putting colour pencil drawings face down on the scanner glass, so bits of loose colour and dust and junk get in there, and then show up in later images. It takes quite a bit of work to fix the image and brush out those specks - as well as fixing any other glaring issues. I tend to save a lot as I go, so I don’t lose progress.

    Unfortunately, for about 3 weeks around the time I made this comic, I’d screwed up the settings in my image processing program, rather than saving at highest quality, I was saving images at lowest quality, and I didn’t notice. The program doesn’t show the crunched image inside it, it just saves it, and windows thumbnails are small… so I just didn’t see that it looked funky until weeks later when I came to upload it to my website. I could fix it by re-scanning the original and doing all the work again, but that’d take forever (and I’d have to find the original drawing in my archive.) - so we’re stuck with this. It’s just one of these story comics though, I’d fixed it by the next one.

    Sorry again. I’m an idiot.

    • wahming@monyet.cc
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      1 year ago

      I see you subscribe to the concept of ‘Archives are not meant to be delved into’

    • Tarte@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I really enjoy your artwork!

      I don’t doubt that your process makes sense for your use-case. And I’m certain that you‘d have thought about alternatives, if they were viable. But your comment left me curious: Why do you prefer to use a regular document scanner for this instead of a good camera or a book scanner?

      Also… as an aside, wouldn’t actually cleaning the scanner regularly be faster in the long run than digitally removing the junk afterwards?

      • Ahdok@ttrpg.networkOP
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        1 year ago

        Honestly, the debris isn’t that oppressive to deal with. A lot of it isn’t on the scanner glass, it’s on the paper itself (smudges from my hands, lines that didn’t erase fully, chunks of pencil wax that I didn’t find and brush off the paper before scanning it) - so they’d appear on other capture systems. I clean the scanner regularly, it’s just surprisingly hard to clean it 100%.

        Given I normally need to touch up a bunch of stuff anyway (clean up text, make the white parts pure white, tweak some wonky lines, make pupils pure black) the debris isn’t much of an issue, I just clean it out as I go, it’s just always something I need to check for in the scan, so I’m always doing some editing when I convert my analogue media to digital for web. I think the results can look really good though.

        I’m not hugely familiar with document scanners (and they’ve come along a long way in recent years) but in my previous experience with camera-based systems, you don’t tend to get great colour accuracy from them unless you have a very expensive system. They’d also mean setting up an extra device in my cramped living space. I do have a cheap “document scanning camera” that livestreams video, and it’s really nice, but the colours are always a little washed out.

        Cameras have all sorts of other issues, alignment is the big one, getting your camera to be not-tilted is pretty rough, and a high quality camera for capture can be pretty expensive. The colour replication in my (modern flagship most expensive) mobile phone is surprisingly bad, and it’s not possible to turn off image processing without jailbreaking the device.

        On the other hand, a cheap flatbed scanner can be part of a printer combo, and it can scan with really good colour replication, It also lets me scan at 1600 DPI - which makes a HUGE high quality image. This is great for editing, you shrink it as the final step.

    • HumbertTetere@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      While a higher quality would be nice, in this case I didn’t notice until you mentioned it.

      Really appreciate your art, it’s nice to look at and so wholesome, it’s a joy to think about.

    • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
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      1 year ago

      Or white Americans about immigrants… They’re there because of fairly recent immigrants, don’t they know that?

      • Square Singer@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        It’s the same mindset with a lot of these people when they go to a different country. I have seriously heard tourists complaining about “all these foreigners” in the country they are visiting. They think, “immigrant” and “foreigner” denotes the others, and not them.

      • Ahdok@ttrpg.networkOP
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        1 year ago

        Razira just like… doesn’t really think about people in terms of labels or identity - she’s very straightforward. Either someone is doing something bad and needs beating up, or someone is a friend and needs protecting or helping. While she would be aware that “goblins tend to get beaten up by adventurers” the moment Konsi becomes a friend, Razira would just completely forget that, because why would you beat up Konsi? Konsi is a friend.