My first printed copy of Weekends With Carl arrived last weekend. The formating of the comic turned out okay, but I didn’t like the way the graytones were converted to black and white. I will be trying to convert the tones to black and white before sending them to the printer to see if it looks any better. I also recolored to cover to improve the contrast and make it more visually interesting.
I just ordered another test copy of the book. If everything turns out fine, I should be able to have copies for sale in mid-February.
Ah, publication proofs are a wonderful thing. Most printing processes don’t actually have any way of making gray, which is of course why halftoning exists to begin with. (Even inkjet printers halftone, albeit with a very tiny random-diffusion mask. And of course no reasonable print shop would use an inkjet for anything but the shortest runs.)
Yeah, in the past I’ve let printers convert grayscale to halftones for me, but in the case of this book I didn’t like the way it looked, so I halftoned it myself. Hopefully it will turn out better.