Index Content Placement Style Art Packaging

4. Art

4.1) Reconstructions
 Redrawing art for whatever reason is where a lot of mistakes occur. Large sfx are one of the more common, but improper spread joining or text on art can pose problems too.

As you're reading through, pay special attention to any text that's directly on art, or art near the center of a spread. Look around the text, and pay attention to see if any of the art wasn't redrawn properly. Common mistakes include:
Just pay more attention to these trouble spots and you should be fine. Also, if it seems that the editor was lazy and tried to use unnecessarily thick stroke to reduce required redrawing, don't hesitate to point that out.

4.2) Leveling
 Make sure the pages aren't overleveled. For the white, this means making sure the pages don't look whitewashed. In particular, faint swirls, rings, or flowery patterns have a tendency to be accidentally leveled out. Also, make sure faint shading is still visible, so that shaded regions are noticeably darker than neighboring white regions. Similarly, for the black, make sure dark grays are preserved instead of blotted out. Most commonly, these will be dark regions neighboring solid black regions, such as folds in clothes or details in the night sky. Also, as far as gradients are concerned, make sure the gradient spans the full distance, instead of being overleveled at the ends.

Also, make sure pages aren't underleveled. For the white, this means making sure what should be white is white. Errors here will often be along the edges, a product of uneven scanning, or blank filler pages that weren't given enough attention. For the black, errors are sometimes forgiveable, though still an error. However, if there's text or stray marks in these regions, a careless editor will just use a solid black brush/eraser to clean it off. This results in a dark gray (often speckled gray) region with solid black scribbles where the brush/eraser was used--an extremely noticeable error (see here for an example). This erasing mistake also occurs with the white end sometimes, so be careful there as well.

Besides carelessness (or ignorance), the most common cause of leveling errors is a poorly calibrated monitor. CRTs seem to be more problematic as well, since looking at an LCD from an angle will exaggerate leveling errors. If the editor levels according to the histogram and not by eye, underleveling mistakes can often be minimized, though leveling solely by histogram can sometimes result in overleveling. Just be careful.

4.3) Edge Errors
 The most common edge error is the miscrop. Basically, when you have art that goes all the way to the edge of the image, sometimes improper cropping after rotation will leave you with wedges of black or white along the edge. For more information on why this happens, see here. Just spend an extra second or two to examine edge art for these errors.

Another edge error is residual gutter effects (shadow/glare or art warping). Again, this is pretty easy to catch if you keep an eye out for it. See here for more.

4.4) Stray Marks
 This is pretty simple as well, but may require you to zoom in a bit. Look for stray specks and smudges that don't belong, especially along the image edges. Also look for spots in patterns and textures, not just solid white or black areas. If you want to take an extra step, use the levels adjustment layer method (see here) to scan for any hard-to-see spots.

Additionally, check inside text bubbles for incomplete erasing, since often people may overlook a stray speck once text has been placed in the bubble. Black specks are easier to catch, but white patterned specks (usually on separate layers for fancier text effects) can leave text with a degraded, distressed look.

Index Content Placement Style Art Packaging