Any Color You Like so Long as it's Black

My favorite place on the web closed up shop today.... Warren Ellis' The Engine.

Learned a lot there, got to meet a ton of people, and had a lot of fun. Thanks to whichever mod provided the best laugh I had all day, switching Warren's usual pic in is sig.

I managed to screen cap it just before the Engine shut down.....

In photoshop CS2, on great feature is the ability to dock palettes vertically. Once you have several palettes docked in this fashion, you can move the entire strip of palettes around at once, hide it all, or show it all at the same time.

One of the other great things about docking (vs tabbing palettes), is that you can resize palettes on the fly, without having to adjust another palette, or move a palette to make room for another.

Two palattes I use that frequently take up a lot of room are Channels Palette, and Layers Palette. Sometimes I have more Layers than Channels, other times I have more Channels than Layers, and docked palettes make it much easier to see a;; the channels or layers in either one.

To dock a palette, drag the palette's tab to the bottom of another palette. To adjust the heights of the docked palettes, simply drag the area right between the two palettes up and down.

Play the video below to see a demonstration of docking a palette, and adjusting the height the Layers Palette.

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One thing that is a bit of a pain is just how much screen real estate is taken up by Adobe Photoshop palettes when coloring.

They can take up huge portions of your screen.


Above are two side by side screen captures from my Cintiq (1600 x1200 pixels, portrait orientation). You can see the Brushes, Tool Presets, Color Swatches, and then a row with History, Color Sliders, Channels, and Layer palettes all docked/stacked above each other.

First to go is the Brushes Palette, docked into the Options bar at the top of the screen. I have about 200 brushes, but for the most part, I use the same dozen or so brushes.

My most frequently used brushes are kept in Tool Presets, which has a shortcut on my Wacom pen to hide/show Tool presets. (Shift+top button on Wacom Pen).

Next, Color Swatches - I have about 650+ swatches, so I like to keep that palette as long as possible to avoid scrolling through it all. Color Swatches are hidden with the top button on Wacom Pen.

Lastly the row with History, Color Sliders, Channels, and Layer palettes all docked/stacked above each other - that's controlled with Option+top button on Wacom Pen.

Quick clicks to get what I need, then hide them so I can see what I'm working on.

For the most part, I do keep the last row open most of the time, because I use the Layers Palette, and color sliders so much.

I just discovered a great option with Wacom Tablet preferences and dual monitors, while answering a question for someone on Gutterzombie.com

Display Toggle! Set one of your tablet or pen buttons to Display Toggle. With a Tablet, you switch between three display modes: Monitor One; Monitor Two, or Dual Monitor. Monitor One or Monitor Two maps the wacom tablet to the entire screen of the respective monitor, while Dual Monitor maps the wacom to both screens.

Display Toggle also applies to the Cintiq as well, except it only switches between the Cintiq or second monitor. But you still have the option of Mode Toggle which allows your cursor to zip around both screens.

Bloody awesome. No more Speedy Gonzales on Steriods cursor flying all over both screens!

The following are all tips I've posted on Gutterzombie.com, The Forum for Digital Comic Book Colorists and Illustrators.

Just found something new... I was trying to set up an action in Photoshop CS to hide two palettes at the same time. You can't. But in the Wacom Preferences, you can set a shortcut to Keystroke, and it can have several keystrokes, so you can set it to hide/show as many palettes as you have keyboard shortcuts for, all at once with one click.

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Ever use the Hue/Saturation Image Adjustment with 'Colorize' checked, then played around with the settings to match a color elsewhere on the page?

Use your eyedropper tool first to select the color you want to match, then open the Hue/Saturation Image Adjustment dialog box and check the Colorize box. It uses the color you have set in the foreground color to colorize your selection/layer/image.

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You can duplicate more than one layer at the same time. Just select all the layers you need duplicated, then drag to the Duplicate Layer icon in the bottom right of the Layers Palette.

Also works for deleting several layers at once by dragging to the Layers palette trash can icon.

Still can't delete multiple channels at once, unfortunately.

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When you want to change brushes, select the brush tool, hold CTRL and click - the Brush Palette pops up. Change your brush, begin a stroke, and the palette disappears.

With the Brush, Grad and Bucket tools, hold down CTRL-Shift to get a popup to change the mode (Normal, Multiply etc).

Usually keyboard shortcuts are faster, but these popup menus show up right under your cursor, and no need to contort one hand, or use both to hit some of those mode keyboard shortcut combinations.

CTRL-Shift also gives a lot of pop-up menus for just about every tool as well - it's one of my most used keyboard shortcuts programmed into my Nostromo Speedpad.

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If you use both the Pencil, and the Brush tool in coloring, open your Photoshop Keyboard shortcuts, and change the Color Replacement Tool shortcut from "B" to nothing (just delete the "B"). It means you don't have to skip past the Color Replacement Tool anymore when using Shift-B to switch between Pencil and Brush tools. Shift-B will just switch back and forth between Pencil and Brush.

I finally upgraded to get some of the extra features Toast 8 has. My favorite is Disk Catalog Maker.

I have 31 dvds of things backed up, and it's a pain to print a list of everything on each dvd. Some have just a few dozen files, others have hundreds.

Disk Catalog Maker scans each disk, and catalogs its contents, which you save like any other doc. The different is, the catalog is searchable. No more swapping disks back and forth to find the file you're looking for. Do a search, check the contents, find the file and what disk its on. Insert dvd and away you go.

For ease and convenience, it also does batch scanning. You insert the first disk, it scans then ejects the disk, so you can swap in the next one.

It took 15 minutes to catalog all 31 of my backup dvds, and it also adds new dvds you burn to the catalog.

So, I've been trying out a few different things, some software downloads, Photoshop's Web Gallery generator, and a few other things for building galleries for my new website.

I've been looking for something as simple as possible, and easy to work with, and be able to create several categories of galleries, one for everything, several galleries for specific books/titles, etc.

So far, the best combination I've found is using Adobe Bridge (part of Adobe Creative Suite, CS version).

By making folders in Bridge, and dragging images to the folder, I can apply labels (On Website, Not On Website, Not Yet Shown, the latter for work that has not been published or seen in the general public yet.)

One advantage to Bridge, is that you can change or set the order of images in a folder, and since I want to show them from newest to oldest, that comes in very handy. It also remembers this so I don't have to re-orgnize every time.

You can select images in a folder by label, which will make it easy to pick the images I want for a web gallery (select by label), or add images. i.e. those in the Not Yet Shown category, I can change their labels to On Website, do a select by Label On Website, and then hit Photoshop Tools ->Create Web Gallery.

I've modified some of the Web Gallery presets (in the Presets Folder in Photoshop) to get the gallery to look how I want, then I just add the folder created to my GoLive site, make a couple minor changes to the codes, and it's done. All I have to upload is whichever new images & thumbnails I've added, the new gallery code, and the new index code.

Organizing 150+ images is the pain the ass. But once it's organized, it should be easy to add new things the gallery and update the website with just a few minutes work.

And now, it's back to coloring Black Summer.

I finally got around to creating a new header, and changing the name of my blog to "Any Color You Like so Long as it's Black", a quote attributed to Henry Ford, with regard to the colors you could pick for your Ford Car.
With respect to CMYK and printing, Black has every color in it, with K, and CMY trapping underneath to give it richer blacks.

Still in the process or designing and building a new website for www.mark-sweeney.com. I'm now in the tedious process of building all the Galleries to showcase my coloring work. I hope to have it done, tested, and uploaded within two weeks, depending on how work goes.

Here's a Quicktime Video showing the wrap cover for Black Summer #0 as a time-lapse viedo screen capture of the coloring, from B&W lineart to final colors.

You can see early in the video I was going for much darker, moodier colors. I felt that was going to far over into a "horror" mood, but I felt that didn't suit the tone of Black Summer, even though what is depicted is horrific.

Black Summer Wrap in Progress Quicktime Video - 2.2 Megabytes.

New images from Black Summer #1 added to the gallery on my website.