HERMAN
janospetrik
Was it a mistake? Could anyone explain it?
You could find it on Comics.com.
Thanks
D. D. Degg
> Herman, Saturday, June 14, 2008.
> Was it a mistake? Could anyone explain it?
Reproduced the color and dropped all the black lines,
including the gag lines below.
Someone more intimate with the process can explain.
The cartoon, in good ol' black and white, can be
viewed on this page at the moment:
http://www.featurebank.com/?title=Bio:Herman%20Dailies
D.D.Degg
Joseph Nebus
Ah, that makes much more sense that way.
#include <WhyIsItTooMuchToAskColorizersToLOOKAtTheStrips.txt>
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
racs...@gmail.com
> janospetrik wrote:
> > Herman, Saturday, June 14, 2008.
>
> http://www.comiczone.com/comics/herman/archive/herman-20080614.html
>
> > Was it a mistake? Could anyone explain it?
>
> Reproduced the color and dropped all the black lines,
> including the gag lines below.
> Someone more intimate with the process can explain.
Color cartoons are emailed or posted in two parts -- the color, which
is relatively low-res, and the black, which is high-res, because of
the need for sharpness in both lines and lettering. At your end, you
superimpose one over the other.
Mike Peterson
http://nellieblogs.blogspot.com
Mark Jackson
OK, but it's still not at all clear how the mono black (K) information
was lost in the creation of the JPEG file that is actually online. Any
automated conversion process ought to raise an error if the input K file
is missing, or empty.
--
Mark Jackson - http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~mjackson
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their
willingness to believe, but in proportion to their
readiness to doubt. - H. L. Mencken
racs...@gmail.com
> peter...@SPAMnelliebly.org wrote:
> > On Jun 16, 9:03 pm, "D. D. Degg" <ddd...@comcast.net> wrote:
> >> janospetrik wrote:
> >>> Herman, Saturday, June 14, 2008.
> >>http://www.comiczone.com/comics/herman/archive/herman-20080614.html
>
> >>> Was it a mistake? Could anyone explain it?
> >> Reproduced the color and dropped all the black lines,
> >> including the gag lines below.
> >> Someone more intimate with the process can explain.
>
> > Color cartoons are emailed or posted in two parts -- the color, which
> > is relatively low-res, and the black, which is high-res, because of
> > the need for sharpness in both lines and lettering. At your end, you
> > superimpose one over the other.
>
> OK, but it's still not at all clear how the mono black (K) information
> was lost in the creation of the JPEG file that is actually online. Any
> automated conversion process ought to raise an error if the input K file
> is missing, or empty.
Is there an automated conversion process? How does it work?
Meanwhile, I've seen (at least once, maybe twice) the black plate left
off printed Sundays, and those are done by human beings.
I've never heard of an automated conversion process, but am willing to
believe it exists. But a lot of that sort of stuff is done by people.
Mike Peterson
http://nellieblogs.blogspot.com
Mark Jackson
> On Jun 17, 7:26 pm, Mark Jackson <mjack...@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:
>> peter...@SPAMnelliebly.org wrote:
>>> On Jun 16, 9:03 pm, "D. D. Degg" <ddd...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>>> janospetrik wrote:
>>>>> Herman, Saturday, June 14, 2008.
>>>> http://www.comiczone.com/comics/herman/archive/herman-20080614.html
>>>>> Was it a mistake? Could anyone explain it?
>>>> Reproduced the color and dropped all the black lines,
>>>> including the gag lines below.
>>>> Someone more intimate with the process can explain.
>>> Color cartoons are emailed or posted in two parts -- the color, which
>>> is relatively low-res, and the black, which is high-res, because of
>>> the need for sharpness in both lines and lettering. At your end, you
>>> superimpose one over the other.
>> OK, but it's still not at all clear how the mono black (K) information
>> was lost in the creation of the JPEG file that is actually online. Any
>> automated conversion process ought to raise an error if the input K file
>> is missing, or empty.
>
> Is there an automated conversion process? How does it work?
Dunno. What are the files sent for printing - TIFFs? (The print-ready
files on Joe Martin's website suggest this is so.) Whatever, there's
software involved in the transformation to JPEG, and that software needs
to be told which file(s) to use as input and what to name the output
file. Hard to believe the syndicate doesn't have this at least scripted
so that each strip doesn't involve a human typing, every day. And if it
*is* a manual operation mistakes ought to be common enough to require
visual checks of the results.
Hm. Perhaps some strips come in single 4-channel TIFFs and others come
as you describe; the scripting handles both cases but has no check for
"one file and no K channel." Sloppy programming, still.
> Meanwhile, I've seen (at least once, maybe twice) the black plate left
> off printed Sundays, and those are done by human beings.
I envision this as being somewhat more likely, as the output of whatever
is done is not a single file but four (one each for CMYK). Easier for
one of them to get lost somewhere along the line. What *is* the actual
workflow?
racs...@gmail.com
I'm not saying nobody should have seen it. It's amazing what gets
through sometimes in a busy environment, which includes a print shop
that is cranking out relatively small runs of comics sections for a
large number of small to mid-sized papers all around the country,
loading them on trucks and shipping them out.
I'm also willing to concede that straight-to-plate setups have changed
and automated tasks that were done by human beings until five years
ago and are still done by human beings at the many places that haven't
gone straight-to-plate. (IE, printing out the metal plates rather than
the negatives from which those plates are shot)
That said, the initial assembly should still be done by a human in the
same sense that a photo on Page One should be toned, cropped, sized
and placed by a human. The assembly of a bi-level tiff is more along
these lines. Once it is on the page, then the machines take over.
Converting a tif to a jpg is a push of a button. People have never
been involved in that task. But they have to create the image being
converted and I haven't heard of automating it. Given the technology
I'm familiar with, you'd have to do enough prep to foolproof the
process for each comic that it would be more efficient simply to place
the damn thing yourself. It's really chimp-work, though I used to blow
it up to 400 or 600 percent to make sure I had it lined up right.
Takes about 20 seconds.
> Hm. Perhaps some strips come in single 4-channel TIFFs and others come
> as you describe; the scripting handles both cases but has no check for
> "one file and no K channel." Sloppy programming, still.
I've worked with several syndicates and none of them output color
comics except as described, unless they've started doing it in the
last three years.
>
> > Meanwhile, I've seen (at least once, maybe twice) the black plate left
> > off printed Sundays, and those are done by human beings.
>
> I envision this as being somewhat more likely, as the output of whatever
> is done is not a single file but four (one each for CMYK). Easier for
> one of them to get lost somewhere along the line. What *is* the actual
> workflow?
I promise you, as someone who has been paid to do this, they do NOT
come in separate CMYK files but as I described. Really. And if the
problem was leaving off the black plate entirely, the entire page of
comics would be effected, not just one feature -- which would include
losing all the dialogue for every comic on that page and all the
titles over the comics.That wouldn't get through in the sloppiest shop
on the planet. Not only would it be screamingly obvious as they came
off the press, but, in setting up the press for the run, not putting a
black plate on one page of a layout would be like leaving your house
with one shoe and one bare foot and not noticing until someone at work
pointed it out.
None of this explains why the Herman on-line comic didn't get its
black layer. My guess is that someone was pushing them out like Happy
Meals and didn't pay attention to what they were doing. And a person
working in an on-line environment may not have as many people
downstream to catch this kind of error before it hits the street.
Mike Peterson
http://nellieblogs.blogspot.com
Mark Jackson
We're talking past each other. I can certainly see that even the
regular composition of individual comics into comic page sections would
likely involve a lot of hand-work under such conditions - each paper (or
group of papers) gets a unique selection and layout, advertising is
variable, changes happen often, have to be prepared to deal with a
missing comic, etc.
Web is different. No substantial webcomic works without a CMS - drop
the file into the right directory, even queue them up there with the
right filenames, and the software makes today's available in the right
place at the right time, adding to the archive as it does so. One final
layout, rare changes. If no comic, no update - instead of a hole in the
page there's yesterday's cartoon still in place. I'd be shocked if the
syndicate sites weren't at least as automated as Keenspot.
>> Hm. Perhaps some strips come in single 4-channel TIFFs and others come
>> as you describe; the scripting handles both cases but has no check for
>> "one file and no K channel." Sloppy programming, still.
>
> I've worked with several syndicates and none of them output color
> comics except as described, unless they've started doing it in the
> last three years.
Yeah, bad example - there's no reason the syndicate should have to make
the JPEGs from print TIFFs anyway; I assume that the original file from
the cartoonist doesn't come in as such a pair.
(In what digital image format *do* cartoonists submit their work to the
syndicates these days?)
> None of this explains why the Herman on-line comic didn't get its
> black layer. My guess is that someone was pushing them out like Happy
> Meals and didn't pay attention to what they were doing. And a person
> working in an on-line environment may not have as many people
> downstream to catch this kind of error before it hits the street.
Assuming the comics don't arrive from the cartoonists as (K, color) file
pairs I don't see how the mono K information could be dropped *at the
syndicate, along the path that leads to the web.* The process has two
outputs, and the natural place to fork is before either final format is
produced.
But perhaps the Web workflow is an add-on, and is poorly-enough designed
not to automate, with reasonable sanity-checking, the print-format to
web-format transformation. Or Herman could be an exception - perhaps
the "classics" from 1992 and before were only processed for print, are
stored as (K, color) pairs, and are unusual in entering the Web workflow
that way.
Whatever, the Web version has now been fixed.
Antonio E. Gonzalez
Uhhh, *what* is suppossed to be wrong here?
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Ted Goldblatt
> On Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:03:49 -0700 (PDT), "D. D. Degg"
> <ddd...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> janospetrik wrote:
>>> Herman, Saturday, June 14, 2008.
>> http://www.comiczone.com/comics/herman/archive/herman-20080614.html
>>
>>> Was it a mistake? Could anyone explain it?
>> Reproduced the color and dropped all the black lines,
>> including the gag lines below.
>> Someone more intimate with the process can explain.
>>
>> The cartoon, in good ol' black and white, can be
>> viewed on this page at the moment:
>> http://www.featurebank.com/?title=Bio:Herman%20Dailies
>>
>
> Uhhh, *what* is suppossed to be wrong here?
It's been fixed - earlier, there was no black (no caption, no edge
lines, no <anything else that is black in the current cartoon>).
Antonio E. Gonzalez
Is there anywhere the "original" can be found?
Mark Jackson
> On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:30:20 -0400, Ted Goldblatt
> <ted.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Antonio E. Gonzalez wrote:
>>> On Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:03:49 -0700 (PDT), "D. D. Degg"
>>> <ddd...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> janospetrik wrote:
>>>>> Herman, Saturday, June 14, 2008.
>>>> http://www.comiczone.com/comics/herman/archive/herman-20080614.html
>>>>
>>>>> Was it a mistake? Could anyone explain it?
>>>> Reproduced the color and dropped all the black lines,
>>>> including the gag lines below.
>>>> Someone more intimate with the process can explain.
>>>>
>>>> The cartoon, in good ol' black and white, can be
>>>> viewed on this page at the moment:
>>>> http://www.featurebank.com/?title=Bio:Herman%20Dailies
>>>>
>>> Uhhh, *what* is suppossed to be wrong here?
>> It's been fixed - earlier, there was no black (no caption, no edge
>> lines, no <anything else that is black in the current cartoon>).
>
> Is there anywhere the "original" can be found?
For a while: http://alumni.caltech.edu/~mjackson/herman_noK.jpg.