Create Your Own Comic Book Panel
YOU’LL NEED THIS
PHOTOSHOP OR ELEMENTS Available from www.adobe.com.
SOME SOURCE PHOTOS You might find what you want online, or take your own.
The hand-drawing of comic book panels is a beautiful and time-consuming process that can create great works of art, and it’s one in which the medium—generally cheap paper—and the formatting of the pages are part of the overall form, meaning the comic-book “look” is immediately recognizable.
It’s not a new medium, either. Comic books date back to at least 1842 in the United States, with the publication of The Adventures of Obadiah Old buck, a story told through a series of illustrations, each with a caption. American comics entered a “golden age” in 1938, with the launch of Superman. Meanwhile, Japan was printing books of illustrated short stories as long ago as the 1700s, which have developed into the enormous media franchises of today’s manga. It’s the American look we’re going to try to recreate here.
Creating comic book panels from photos is, frankly, cheating, but when you haven’t got the time or the talent to go to the trouble of penciling, inking, coloring, and lettering, you can create a similar effect in Photoshop.
1 GET SOURCE IMAGES READY Get an idea in your head of what you want your finished panel to look like. We like helicopters and explosions, but if you want to do something involving androgynous young men and their feelings, that’s OK, too. Find some source images, either taking them yourself or picking public domain photos from the Internet. We’ve roughly composited three photos into one image using the Magic Wand tool to select and remove the sky behind the helicopter and on top of the explosion, then dropping a blue sky into the background, and using Free Transform to stretch it to fit [ Image A].
2 USE LAYERS The bright colors of a comic book panel are instantly recognizable, so to begin with, we can increase the saturation of our image a bit. Place a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer on top of your layer stack by going to “Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation” [ Image B]. Using an Adjustment layer means you don’t need to flatten your existing layers into one, as the Adjustment layer affects every layer below it in the stack. You can move it up and down the Layers palette to change how many layers it affects. Make sure your elements are in the right positions, as you’re about to flatten the image. Perhaps create a new Snapshot in the History palette, so you can come back to this point in the future if you’re not happy. Head to “Layer > Flatten Image.”
3 ADD A COMIC BOOK EFFECT Now we’re going to apply the comic book effect. Cheap, poor-quality paper—completely unlike the thick, smooth paper-stock this magazine is printed on—is a hallmark of comic-book publishing. The books were often marketed at children, and meant to be thrown away at the end of each week, so why bother with quality materials? The way the ink soaks into the paper is part of what gives comic books their distinctive look. We’re going to add a little grain to our image, so open the Filter Gallery (“Filter > Filter Gallery”) and choose “Film Grain” under “Artistic” [ Image C]. We’ve gone for Grain: 7, Highlight Area: 0, Intensity: 5, but the settings will vary depending on the source images you’ve used. Once it looks good, hit “OK.”
4 APPLY THE COLOR HALFTONE FILTER As you flattened earlier, the only layer you have is a Background. Double-click this to make it Layer 0, then duplicate it by right-clicking it, and selecting the appropriate option from the menu that appears. We’re going to add the halftone effect to the top layer, to make our image look as though it was printed using a series of dots, varying in size or spacing, to represent the transitions between colors. There’s a simple filter for this: “Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone.” We chose a setting of 6 for “Max Radius,” and left the other settings alone. The “Screen Angles” represent the way different colors’ screens would be rotated relative to one another in the printing process, to minimize the effects of moire patterns and other distracting visual flaws. Annoyingly, there’s no “Preview” checkbox on this filter, so the only way to experiment is to hit the “OK” button, and be ready with Ctrl-Z if you don’t like the effect. Remember, selecting the filter name that appears at the top of the “Filter” menu reapplies it with the same settings it was last used at, so you have to select it from the “Pixelate” submenu to run the filter again with different settings. The next step changes the look of the image, so it might be worth changing your mind only after you’ve seen the result.
5 BRING SOME DETAIL BACK With your top, half-toned layer selected, change its blend mode to “Darken” using the drop-down menu on the Layers palette. This makes the effect of the Halftone filter less obvious, and puts back a little of the detail that was lost when the filter was applied.
6 FINISHING TOUCHES If you’re happy with the result, add a few more comic book touches, such as a black outline, by selecting the whole composition with Ctrl-A, then going to “Edit > Stroke,” and stroking a black line around the inside of the selection rectangle’s edges. If you want to add a caption, draw a rectangle in one of the corners, and stroke its edges with black, but this time fill it with white or yellow, and simulate a hand-drawn border by using the Ocean Ripple filter (“Filter Gallery > Distort > Ocean Ripple”) set to “Large Waves.” Add your text in a suitable font—Comic Sans if you must, but other fonts are available online that are free for personal use—then save your image, flatten it, and export it as a jpeg for sharing or printing [ Image D].