POD Illustrations

[Grand_Commander13]

Okie dokie.  People should know my story by now, but I'm going to repeat myself anyway!

I'm going to be (obviously) publishing an RPG soon.  I will probably be going with Lulu.com for at least print on demand work (people ordering off the internet), though they're an option for all printing if I somehow can't find anyone better.

My illustrator is really quickly gonna need to know how well Lulu, other POD printers, and traditional printers handle pencil.  Because if what several people say is true, and they can't handle the fine shading of pencil, then he's gonna have to whip out the ink pen.  It's not gonna be as nice as a pencil drawing, but at least it'll print.

And even if Lulu/other PODs don't do pencil well, will other printers?  I don't know if I'd be able to have two different sets of art, but I may be able to have a Lulu version without the art.

So, a summary of what I asked:
How do POD printers (especially LightningSource and Lulu) handle pencil drawings?
How to traditional printers handle pencil drawings.
And finally: Will it be safe to go with pencil illustrations?

[madelf]

Pencil drawings are used fairly often, so at least the tradtional printers should be able to handle them.

As I noted in the other thread, I think lulu.com did a fine job reproducing pencil drawings. They were simply scanned as 300dpi TIF files.


I suspect what people are having problems with isn't so much a factor of the pencil or grayscale drawings themselves so much as the method of screening the image for print. Unfortunately I don't have enough knowledge of the process to explain properly how transforming the gray tones into dots works, but the basic idea is that the smaller & tighter the dots the better the image, while the larger and more wildly spaced the dots the worse the image.

In my personal opinion I think any printer (POD or otherwise) should be able to handle pencil or grayscale images if they made the effort, and if they can't (or won't) I'd look for someone else.

As a suggestion....
take some of the artist's pieces, scan them and assemble them into a booklet and get a single copy printed at lulu.com
Then you'll know what they're going to look like.

[Ben O'Neal]

I suspect what people are having problems with isn't so much a factor of the pencil or grayscale drawings themselves so much as the method of screening the image for print. Unfortunately I don't have enough knowledge of the process to explain properly how transforming the gray tones into dots works, but the basic idea is that the smaller & tighter the dots the better the image, while the larger and more wildly spaced the dots the worse the image.

Whilst I'm not an industry guru or anything, and I certainly don't work for a printer (that would be too cool), I can make an educated guess. When the eye sees a pencil drawing, it factors in for the texture of the paper and the fact that pencil almost never fills the texture. When you print out a pencil drawing on the super-smooth paper of a published book, there is no texture, and so by comparison to the paper, the drawing looks poor. Compounding this is that from what I know, the conversion from on-screen ppi to printing dpi is fairly straightforward, so if you have a single pixel that is wholy grey, then that will be a wholy grey printed dot, but if you don't have enough pixels, or have too many, it has to start guessing. I could be wrong though, I have more experience with the computer side of things, rather than the printing side.

But one thing I will suggest as a possible culprit, is colour profile mismatch.  If you have have access to photoshop, make sure any drawings you are printing are set up to match the printer setup. Go to Image>Mode>Grayscale, then if you have layers it will ask you to merge them and click yes (you don't need layers in a print tif), then go to Image>Mode>Assign Profile, and choose the dot grain that your printer tells you (you'll probably have to ask specifically). You might be surprised at how much difference there is between each profile. Then you'll probably have to tweak the image a bit, then just save it as an un-compressed tif and you're done. If it works like it's supposed to, what you see on the screen should match very closely to the final printed output. Any differences from then on will be due to things you have no control over.

take some of the artist's pieces, scan them and assemble them into a booklet and get a single copy printed at lulu.com
Then you'll know what they're going to look like.

This is a good suggestion. This is what I was planning on doing when I eventually release my RPG, sort of like a "make your own proof", because it's dirt cheap and uses the exact same process as all your customers will get. If you don't like the output, you can always "un-publish" (at least with Lulu).

Hope that's at least partially helpful,
-Ben

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Calvin and Ben are right as rain. Great comments.

All I can add is a recent data point: in Bones, published using Lulu, Andrew Navaro's pencilled artwork looks excellent.

Best,
Ron

[Blankshield]

This is fairly straightforward, but it's a mistake I've made (not wrt game publishing, but still) and sometimes the obvious needs saying:

Scan your artwork at the absolute highest possible resolution you can.  Do not go to "the guy I know who has a scanner" unless he happens to have unreasonably top of the line equipment.  Go to a professional document services place  and get it done right.  The files will be huge and unwieldy and need to be manipulated down before they get into print - but manipulating down is OK, it's manipulating UP that results in crappy looking artwork.

James