#chance press

[chancepress]

New Kickstarter! I’m raising money to publish a revised and expanded edition of my essay about Luigi Serafini and the Codex Seraphinianus. Any help reblogging or signal boosting to your legions of fans is mega appreciated.

[chancepress]

No more publishin’

Most people probably saw this coming, but Chance Press isn’t going to publish any more books. We’ve had a good run over eight years, but our insanely slow release schedule, the constraints of the micro-edition, handmade niche that we live in, money stuff, and a general lack of energy make this the right choice. I hope to stay involved in the game by helping other folks with binding and printing, and I’m sure I’ll keep making one-off stuff for fun. 

Part of scaling back involves getting rid of a bunch of stuff I won’t need anymore. Some of they fancy tools will be put up for sale (stack cutter, laminating press, corner rounding press, one of the inkjet printers, etc), but I’m also happy to give away a bunch of other stuff, especially paper. I have TONS of paper, and I’m never going to use it all. Most of it is 8.5″ x 11″ and can be laser printed, so if you’re looking for a way to fancy up a DIY zine or comic, this could be a great option. If you’re in the SF Bay Area, hit me up at books at chancepress dot com and we can figure something out.

[chancepress]

Finished copies of my bootleg Simon Hanselmann portfolio. I'm pretty happy with how these came out. Black velvet bookcloth over heavyweight boards, endpapers and pockets are Rives BFK, cover and spine pasted owns are Hahnemuhle Etching Rag printed with Ultrachrome ink. Not bad for a weekend's work!

[chancepress]

All you recent followers may not know that I occasionally turn this wonderful Tumblr blog into a shameless arm of self-promotion. Chance Press is in fact a functioning small press, and this is our newest book, available for preorder now. Various guises have been produced for your enjoyment, including a hardcover bound in velour-flocked cloth and signed by the author.

Buy here: http://store.chancepress.com/product/katrin-gibb-as-elvis

[chancepress]

Note: you can buy the print I’m talking about in this post here. 

One skill I never really thought much about when starting a press is color correction. I don’t really know how to do much in Photoshop, and I’d venture that most cartoonists are much more proficient than I am. (In fact, when I started working on A Deitch Miscellany, Kim sent me the Sex! Drugs! and Sweet Music! artwork with the color layers and b&w artwork in separate files. He had to give me a really detailed step-by-step rundown on how to merge the two files before I could even do anything with them. I say this up front so I don’t present myself like some expert in the field, which I’m not. Instead, like pretty much everything else I’ve done with Chance Press, I just messed around a bunch until I found a system that works for me.

“The Glowing House Along the Way” was definitely the most challenging color correction project I’ve had, since the original artwork no longer exists. (The original line art was sold, and the scan that was used in the digital coloring process is no longer usable.) The only surviving copy of the artwork is a page from the LA Weekly that Kim had scanned and sent along to me for possible inclusion in the Miscellany book. Here’s why this particular print was so difficult for me to pull off:

The scan doesn’t have dark blacks. The blacks are washed-out and have a greenish or brownish cast.

The background is yellowish gray

The colors are dark but still reasonably bright despite all this

Here’s why these three attributes make color correction especially tough. Normally, when the blacks aren’t dark enough, increasing the contrast or adjusting the levels will help. However, in this case, that only made the background darker as well. And when the background has a non-white cast to it, increasing the exposure and compensating with gamma correction will get rid of it. However, colors are really sensitive to changes in exposure, and it’s really easy to end up with a nice white background and washed-out colors. Lastly, you can sometimes address the washed-out color issue by increasing the saturation, but with colors that were already pretty dark, increasing the saturation ends up making the skin tones look bright orange.

For this print, I made a bunch of really small changes, and I toggled the Photoshop “preview” option on and off to switch back and forth between the original and whatever change I was making. I also saved tons of different versions of the file and made a boatload of test prints as well. In running down my process, this is just a basic approximation of what I did (since I did most of this work a couple years ago and don’t really remember it step-by-step). Also, it wasn’t as easy as just following each of these steps, since I kept stopping to proof. 

Okay, here we go...

This is where we’re starting from: (By the way, that white circle is a reference white, since I’m ideally trying to match the background color of the artwork to that.)

Step 1 - bump up the exposure to get rid of the gray cast. 

Step 2 - increase the gamma correction way more than seems advisable to compensate for the washed-out look.

Step 3 - This is a push and pull that could go on and on, but anyway: now go back and increase the exposure again to match the reference white. (The reference white is on a different layer, so it isn’t affected by any of the changes to the artwork.)

Step 4: Equalize the blacks by using the replace color tool to get rid of the brown and green casts. (I use the demonic Waldo’s stomach to sample the “brown” black and the main guy’s pants to sample the “green” black.) To avoid overly darkening the print, adjust the fuzziness of the replace color tool appropriately.

Step 5: the blacks look good now, but the print is way too dark, and the colors are too fluorescent. Start to address this by reducing the contrast (by a lot) and increasing the brightness (by a *very* small amount).

Step 6: Get control of the color by backing off the saturation only as much as is absolutely necessary. (Too much and the print will look flat.) If reducing the saturation darkens the print, increase the lightness ever-so-slightly.

And there you go. Looks pretty good, right? Obviously this doesn’t take into account how it’s being printed, what paper you’re using, etc. And I’d normally make proofs at each stage to make sure I’m not over-or-underdoing any of the adjustments. Sorry this was so long - hopefully one or two of you found it interesting enough.

[chancepress]

Hey Tumblords... It’s been a while since I’ve released anything under the Chance Press banner, but tonight you get a surprise print release! The artwork is ‘The Glowing House Along the Way’ by Kim Deitch, originally included in the deluxe edition of A Deitch Miscellany. This print is slightly smaller (13″ x 17″) and has slightly modified colors. Limited to 20, $150 each, preorders open now.

[chancepress]

Finally got around to the copies of this book that I owe to people who donated to the Rowhouse Residency... Sorry for making you three generous people wait so long! These books are all assembled-to-order, so it takes me a little while to get off my lazy ass whenever someone buys one. Speaking of which, there are only six copies left, so if you want one, head over to store.chancepress.com to pick one up for yourself. I have to say, the cover of this one is probably my favorite one I've ever done.

[chancepress]

New Chance Press books in the works. This is a prose book for a change, meaning I traded hours of color correction and test prints for hours of text formatting and editing. As the author of this book is fond of saying, “Six dozen of one, half of the other.”