MORE help with color, please?

**handrawn** · 23 January 2012, 09:09 AM

well done! - soon gets to be second nature...

Boy is right about the file type - xara assumes a jpg is a photo - the 'photo document' is optimised for photo editing but there is no reason not to use it as long as you make sure you use the option to save the xar as well, as you have done

But it's worth reading the section that he referenced - there are advantages to working with a 'normal' document

**Boy** · 23 January 2012, 05:16 PM

I guess a boy needs some fatherly validation and correction now and then ...

**handrawn** · 23 January 2012, 06:01 PM

concur

**Toonicorn** · 23 January 2012, 06:26 PM

Originally Posted by Boy

Thanks for sharing the .xar file to show us how you tackle coloring.

I noticed that you use a photo document for the drawing. This probably happened automatically when you imported a .jpeg scan of your sketch. It's not really a problem but if you want to know more about this, you can find additional information about the characteristics of a photo document in the Help file: Under the "Index" tab, type "photo documents" in the search box.

Well...when I scan in my pencil drawings, I always set the scanner to "Document", "Grayscale" and "JPG" and I usually set the DPI at 300. Am I doing something wrong?

**handrawn** · 23 January 2012, 06:32 PM

[not answering for Boy

]

no you are not doing anything wrong

if you ever want to print your scans though you would be better setting your scanner to PNG or BMP, [or PSD or PDF even]

JPG is designed for photographs - it may not print pencil/ink sketches well - same goes for your final drawing - better not exported as a JPG unless it is for web use only

300dpi is fine for print

edit

96dpi for web

**Toonicorn** · 23 January 2012, 08:42 PM

Originally Posted by handrawn

[not answering for Boy

]

no you are not doing anything wrong

if you ever want to print your scans though you would be better setting your scanner to PNG or BMP, [or PSD or PDF even]

JPG is designed for photographs - it may not print pencil/ink sketches well - same goes for your final drawing - better not exported as a JPG unless it is for web use only

300dpi is fine for print

edit

96dpi for web

Yes, I always get my work photographed in TIFF, and if I embellish it in PS, I always embellish the TIFF file. I just use the JPEG scans of my pencil drawings to ink over in PS or Xara. These Toonicorn drawings aren't meant for print - just to post to my blogs. But I will keep in mind to save the finished stuff in TIFF. They seem to print well in that format. Thanks!

**handrawn** · 23 January 2012, 09:06 PM

yes tiff is designed for print - it all makes cosmic sense

and I like the drawings too .. good luck keep us posted ...

**Toonicorn** · 24 January 2012, 09:35 PM

Ummm...yeah, I'm back again. Can anyone here tell me what I did?

In this drawing here:

toonposelast 001.jpg.xar

You see that cool shading on the Toonicorn's mane and so on? I did that by accident. I was messing around with fills and transparency, and somehow, when I drew in the shapes on the mane (and so on), they came out in a sort of faded shadow, very nice. But I can't remember how I did that. I didn't draw a solid shape first and then use the fill or transparency buttons, either - I just drew the shape, and it came out like that. Can anyone here tell me HOW I did that?

Thanks!

**amoore** · 24 January 2012, 10:13 PM

Poking at various shapes in your image, I found a number of elliptical fills, but no transparencies. To see what you did, select a shape, then click through several tools, particularly Fill and Transparency. The Property Bar will show you exactly what you did.

**zaphodeist** · 24 January 2012, 10:29 PM

After extensive research ...

TIFF was developed as an attempt as an industry standard 'scanner' format. Invented by Aldus.

TIFF was originally created as an attempt to get desktop scanner vendors of the mid-1980s to agree on a common scanned image file format, rather than have each company promote its own proprietary format. In the beginning, TIFF was only a binary image format (only two possible values for each pixel), because that was all that desktop scanners could handle. As scanners became more powerful, and as desktop computer disk space became more plentiful, TIFF grew to accommodate grayscale images, then color images. Today, TIFF is a popular format for high color-depth images, along with JPEG and PNG.

It is no more designed for print than JPG is for printing photos