If any large scale archiving of this material is to be done, it would really take a lot of money, not only to print these books, but to hire people to restore the pages and put the books together. Somebody who really cares about comics, our comics culture and history, and has the time to do it is really needed. If he’s rich it would be great, but if not, he needs to go out and solicit money for it.

It would be something great to do, and I wish I had the time, but my primary purpose is to create comics myself. And that’s a full time job in itself. The free time I have I work on El Indio for several hours a week.

But yeah, seeing those books in print again, would be fantastic.

Thanks again, and keep up the fine work.

Joe

For a black and white page like that page of EL INDIO this is what we do…

Using Photoshop, the first thing you do is do an “Auto Levels”. Just make sure you select only the scanned image, and don’t select any white areas outside the scanned image or else the Auto Levels won’t work as it should. You’ll be startled at how this one step improves the clarity of the page immediately.

Your objective is to bring out the black and remove the remaining dirt without losing the thinnest lines, and closing lines that are very close together.

At this point it’s hard to describe an exact process because it depends on what your eye sees and what happens on the page. And take note that there are a lot of different ways to achieve the same thing. Other processes may well be more efficient than mine. But this is what I’ve gotten used to.

Experiment with “Curves” to darken the lines at the same time lighten the spaces outside the lines.

Then use “Levels” and play around with the Input Levels. Try 60, 1.00, and 205. Change the values as you see fit. Repeat if necessary.

Then use “Unsharp Mask” and try Amount : 150, Radius: 4. Leave threshold alone. Change the values as you see fit.

Zoom in so you can see individual pixels and zero in on the remaining color pixels. start with the lightest yellow ones. Then use “Replace Color” to replace the yellow with white. Then start picking off the next darker yellow colors and other colors you see. Be careful about removing the darker red, blue and green colors because sometimes the thinnest lines disappear. You really have to have a very strong black line at this point before you start removing colors or else many tiny details will disappear.

You can strengthen faintest lines with the dodge tool if you wish.

Now comes the hard part. Convert the file to greyscale and start fixing the drawing. Fill in areas that should be black and remove excess dirt, pixel by pixel if necessary. Zoom in very close and start reconstructing lines that have been damaged, using your instincts as an artist to understand what the original artist was thinking. Sometimes you need to make decisions on what would make the image look good without having to compromise the original artists’ intent.

Good luck!

Joe

So far wala pa akong plano na susunod na print compilation after ng EL INDIO. Malamang doon ko na iko-concentrate ang extra time ko to do yung Philippine Comics Art book na matagal ko na ring binubuo.