Greetings all,

I'm having a rather unusual graphics issue and I'm hoping someone can help me figure out why.

On my cover art (both on the book and on my website) it was designed to, and about half the people looking at it see it as, a color image that fades evenly into a black background. The effect should be that the actual foreground of the image "pops" out of the black. For some reason, though, some people don't get the effect of the dithering fade and you can see the solid borders of the image background. Examples can be found on both of the painted images on http://www.gmpress.com/valherjar. They should fade evenly into the black background.

But I have no idea why it doesn't always work. Thoughts?

Thanks!

You've run smack into the bane of all computer artists: non-standardized monitor displays. There's little to nothing you can do about it, because you cannot control the end-user's monitor settings, or what a factory considers "standard" (to say nothing of the phosphor mixtures they use).

If the viewer's monitor is configured for gamma, brightness, and contrast correctly (which a graphic designer would have), then they will not see the borders. If they are configured for some other task, or (more usually) incorrectly configured (usually not the user's fault: they are just using factory settings), then they will likely see borders.

You can test this yourself: go play with your settings, ramp up the brightness, change the color temperature, and see if you can see the borders then (I did this, and I could see the borders; with my normal settings, I cannot).

If your book is going to print, get a proof done and plan on making some corrections. Only the proof will give you an inkling of what it might look like on press.

If it's for web only or laser printers, there's not too much you can do about it.

-L

Thanks to you both, and that is definately my problem. So now off to bang my head into a table until a solution arises.

Maybe I'm not understanding the problem. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Is the background supposed to be a smooth transition from image to solid background all the way around the image, except for the horn/claw thingings on creatures arms?

What I see is the corners having what I think is the effect you want, but the sides don't. Am I stating your concern correctly?

Chris: Yeah, I believe you're identifying the problem correctly. What I see when I look at it is a smooth transition where the background of the image slowly fades to black and blends in with the black backdrop, leaving no hard corners and no random color points.

Your black border reads 95% Cyan, 85% Magenta, 85% Yellow, and 85% Black. The fade in the lower corners looks good, the fade in the upper left in iffy and the fade in the upper right is not good. You have the shadows on the wall and ground too different in color, which is giving you the noticable solid lines on the top, bottom, and sides.

To correct, what I feel is wrong, you may want to open the image in photoshop, make a new layer and fill with your base color, in this case 95/85/85/85. Switch that around to be your bottom layer. Feather the image in and history brush the horn thingies back in.

That should cut the hard edges of your border and give you a decent fade.

You may wanna darken up the blacks in the image to give it more punch. Right now your darkest blacks are in the 93/85/68/68 range.

I presume that it's going to press, so everything I adjust is in CMYK. If it's a pdf release, you can do basically the same thing, but your color's will be a different value.

I hope that helps.

That was great, Chris. Thanks!