Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Preparing Images for Blurb: Color Management

I've been away from the blog for a while, but now I'm ready to pick up where I left off.  In the last post, I showed a process video of how I shaded and highlighted my drawings.  Once all of my pages were completely colored, I added a few shadows with the pen and shape tools.  Also some extra little effects here and there that I felt were needed.  Then it was time to prepare my illustrations for Blurb.  First, I decide to test print a few pages to see how the color would look.  My images were printing much darker than they appeared on screen.  Thankfully, I went to the Blurb website and found a way to help improve the color.  I downloaded their Blurb ICC Profile.  This way I could view my illustrations in Photoshop and have a more accurate idea of how they would look printed.

Here is a link to the Blurb ICC Profile:

Color Management Resource Center | Blurb

ICC Profile in Photoshop:


Once the ICC Profile was downloaded, I used color adjustments to change some of the colors.  I created two new layers above all of my other layers.  One for the color balance adjustment and the other for vibrance.



Here is a before and after:
(The changes look subtle, but it actually made a big difference.)




I then test printed a few pages and was happier with the color results.  Now I was ready to prepare my files to create the book in Blurb.

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