The ComicBase Cover Scanning Guide

This new scanning guide will give you step-by-step instructions for making your scans look their best using the new sizes and color depths used by ComicBase 9.

When ComicBase was started back in the early 1990s, screen sizes for home computers topped out around 640 x 480, with a maximum of 256 colors. In those days, the 4.25" x 2.9", 256-color images bundled with ComicBase looked downright spiffy.

With the release of ComicBase 5, however, we rescanned tens of thousands of comics to make the images about 50% larger and clearer than the early versions. But given the fixed display area of ComicBase, cover scans from ComicBase 5 were still limited to a maximum of 5.3" tall x 3.625" wide.

Beginning with ComicBase 9, however, you are free to scan in comics at whatever size you like, and they will be automatically sized to fit your available screen space. For ComicBase 9 and beyond, all new scans will be produced at full size, 100 dpi, making for dramatically bolder and more detailed pictures than ever before.

Scanning Your Image Into ComicBase

1. Scan the comic book cover at 100% at 240 dpi in RGB color (our recommended settings).

2. Next, use the crop tool to crop your image.

3. Use the Image Size command in your image editing program to resize the image to 100 dpi.
   
   



Special Characters in File Names

In naming your images and folders, Windows prohibits you from using certain characters in your file names including: “?”, “*” “\”,“";” and “.”.

If any of these characters appear in the name, substitute a hyphen “-” character instead.

4. By scanning the image at a higher resolution before shrinking it down to screen resolution (100 dpi), we can reduce moire patterns (bands of colored pixels that appear jagged and uneven on your scans). The drawback is that the resulting image may look a little soft. If you are working with Photoshop, you can fix this by using the Filter menu's Sharpen > Unsharp Mask command. Set the Unsharp Mask to 50% with a radius of 1.0 pixels and a threshold of 0.

5. Name the saved picture “1.jpg” or whatever the corresponding number is for the issue you've scanned. Be sure to save your file in JPEG format.

6. Now that you have your picture scanned, there are a couple of ways to add it to the correct Pictures folder in ComicBase.

   The easiest way is to save the image to your desktop and then drag and drop the picture icon into the thumbnail view of the title:

If you like, however, you can also save your image directly to the image folder. Where your picture folder lives depends on what operating system you’re using. Pictures are now saved to the following different folders for Windows Vista and XP, respectively:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Human Computing [XP]

C:\Users\Public\Documents\Human Computing [Vista]

ComicBase will look for your picture based on its publisher and title name under the Pictures folder. Thus, if you were saving a cover scan of CrossGen’s Ruse #1, you would save it to this location:

ComicBase will then list all the available pictures for a title using the icon next to the issue number:

Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, and DC Titles:

Due to the huge number of comics from these major publishers, you need to add another level to the folder hierarchy when saving scans of titles published by major companies like Marvel or DC. Specifically, an extra folder with the first letter of the title should be inserted after the publisher name. DC's Four Star Spectacular, for instance, is saved in:

Creating the Picture Folder:

ComicBase can also make the folder for you. When adding or modifying a title in ComicBase, just check "Create picture folder" before you save the title. ComicBase will automatically determine the proper folder hierarchy for pictures of this title, and create it if it didn't previously exist.

You can also create the necessary picture folders by right clicking on the title’s thumbnail and selecting “Create Picture Folder”:

Tools of the Trade

For image scanning and retouching in ComicBase, we use Adobe Photoshop, and do our scanning directly within the program using Photoshop's "Import" command. Any modern scanner will do an admirable job of scanning your comics, but for raw scanning speed it's hard to beat the Epson GT-10000+ or Perfection 3200 series.

We've also created a free set of custom Photoshop Actions, which will automatically import, image-size, sharpen, and save with the touch of just a few keys. Photoshop users can take a look at these Actions by loading our new Standard ComicBase Actions into their copy of Photoshop.

Import a comic and crop the image manually. Once the image is cropped, simply hit F3 and Photoshop will automatically resize, sharpen, and save your image.