Salt & Battery Comics

Howdy folks! It’s been a few days since I’ve posted much of anything, but here I come with a little bit of exciting technical news:

Since I started doing comics again, I’ve been having a bit of a problem exporting my strips from Manga Studio – specifically, all of the tones (shading) which I had designated as solid gray values were instead outputting as very fine halftone dots. This wouldn’t normally be an issue if I was working at the same resolution as the finished product, but working at a larger resolution and reducing it in size for the web was causing some light interference patterns to form in my nice, clean grays.

For those uninitiated in the ways of halftones in digital images, when you shrink an image with a small, repeating pattern, you will get a kind of artifact called a moiré pattern. In my case, it was appearing as a sort of checkered effect where I had shaded in parts of the strip. I knew this would happen to a degree in places where I had intentionally done halftone dots, but I was a little disappointed that my ‘grays’ also had these patterns, especially since I didn’t want them to output as halftones in the first place.

Well since I recently upgraded to Manga Studio 4.0 my gray tones have been outputting correctly. I don’t know if I just didn’t have the right settings in the last version or if the new program made a difference, but I took the liberty of re-processing all the new Salt & Battery strips so that the grays display properly. While nothing has changed with the intentional halftones (there’s still a bit of a moiré pattern going on), the grays should be showing up much cleaner than before. If you’ve been keeping up with the strip, you may have to refresh your page to see the new versions.