Irregular Webcomic! #1373

Since I began making Irregular Webcomic! I've been using Paint Shop Pro 5 to do all my graphics work. Paint Shop Pro is now up to version 10. I thought it was about time I upgraded.

This is the first strip to be made entirely with Photoshop CS2. (I have done a few manipulations with Photoshop before, but not made an entire strip with it.) Having spent the past few months learning the ins and outs of Photoshop, I finally feel comfortable enough ditching PSP5 entirely and doing the entire assembly process in Photoshop.

The hardest part was getting the dialogue font to match. I experimented with it for some time before realising that the size of the font produced by Photoshop depends on the resolution of the image. Then I had to play with it some more to find what resolution actually matched what PSP5 was doing. And PSP5 only had the option of choosing anti-aliasing or no anti-aliasing. Photoshop provides 4 different anti-aliasing algorithms, that all look subtly but noticeably different.

So I eventually came up with the recipe that I had to set the image resolution to 92 pixels per inch (why that number, I have no idea), and then I could use the same font size as I used in PSP5, and if I use the "Crisp" anti-aliasing option, it produces text that is pretty much indistinguishable from the dialogue font I've been using all along.

The good thing is that Photoshop is considerably more powerful in terms of layout, colour balance correction, and image filtering options, so the overall process of making a comic is now much easier. I still need to practice to get up to the efficient speed I managed with PSP5, but I think that over time I should be able to make comics faster than before.

The goal of all this is to produce comics that look pretty much the same as before, except perhaps with better colour and contrast. I didn't want to change the visual style dramatically, as it's pretty well established now.

2016-05-23 Rerun commentary: Wow, that's a bit of a landmark. I still use Photoshop to make comics, but it's now progressed beyond version CS6 and into the Creative Cloud.

And yes, I've gotten a lot faster and better at using it over the years. I now have several macros saved which do various common tasks that I do on comics.

I also use Photoshop to process photos (oddly enough). It's actually one of my most used applications and sits pretty much permanently open on my desktop.