From charcoal drawing to screen-ready film (?)

[Biklops]

Hi everyone!

Well, time to make another poster. I'd like to base it on a charcoal drawing of mine--Would I reduce it to 1 color in Photoshop using halftones, or is there another way? I'd like to keep the 'wispy ends' of the charcoal strokes, y'know?

[The Fresh Prints]

i think i saw a grezca thread and he was going straight onto the film.

[Casey Burns]

grzeca photocopies his drawings directly onto transparencies at kinko's.

if your drawing is more than one color of charcoal, you might try scanning it, adjusting levels to your desired contrast, then converting to a bitmap mode tiff using diffusion dither when prompted (dither helps preserve pencil and charcoal shading, while 50% threshold is better for crisp line work). if you scanned at 300 dpi, go to 600 dpi (always double it) when converting to bitmap. then output to film.

you'll lose some details, but that's probably the closest you'll get without killing yourself.

[Biklops]

if your drawing is more than one color of charcoal, you might try scanning it, adjusting levels to your desired contrast, then converting to a bitmap mode tiff using diffusion dither when prompted (dither helps preserve pencil and charcoal shading, while 50% threshold is better for crisp line work). if you scanned at 300 dpi, go to 600 dpi (always double it) when converting to bitmap. then output to film.

Sweet tips! I'll check out that Grezca thread, as well. And, I'll post my results as soon as I have any!

[Andymac]

this was a charcoal drawing/pencil drawing that was grey
scanned original
it was converted to a duotone with the background plate yellow 5%-65% and the top plate transparent brown the high contrast range

you can do the same with a tritone, if you wanted it to pick up the real wispy stuff and mix 3 shades of grey.

this has a stochastic dot (dithered) instead of a halftone

[Biklops]

Andy--what you just said sounds like this to me:

"The top boogle was bibbed with a 45% high yield interest rate--you could always trlineate the issue with a 4% muck-muck if you wanted to."

I'll go grab my copy of "print process for the digital designer" and get back to you on this.

It does look AWESOME.

[Grzeca]

I wouldn't recommend my retarded process to any sane human. I do like the photocopy machines, its true.

[Andymac]

Well the guy's obviously insane Dan, he screenprints.

[Biklops]

My sanity has never been in question--everyone knows I'm nuts.