Question... can't you just use Medibang Paint or ClipStudio Paint Bucket Fill tool, which lets you expand your fill over lineart by couple pixels, and doesn't escape through gaps? Just remember to on a new layer below your 'main' flats also fill empty space 'within' the thicker lines/blacks to create rich black?
There are a lot of ways to do all of this in various apps. In my experience, most professional art isn't drawn in a way that makes "special" fill tools like that faster.
@@colorwithkurt Another question: does the color of the flats under the lineart matter? I mean, actual colorist will not actually touch that in the end, it's just there to create rich black as far as I understand...
I cannot like this enough. Been going through several dozen videos about digital colouring and no one was showing useful flatting info. They all skipped that to get right to the fancier stuff and it's pretty critical when you're brand new. Thanks so much for this!
So glad I found this video. I'm not a flatter or colorist, but trying to do flatting for myself on my own comic and I see where I'm messing up and wasting time. This is such a time-saver. You're very good at teaching as well. Subscribed now, thanks!
Ah yes, I remember flatting for about 7 different colorists. Most time-consuming part of the process. Actually got my mom to flat with me and we could turn books out pretty fast! :-)
@@telavia577 Unless you like working 6-8 hours a day for $5-10 a page, forget it. Fast way to get burned out. But if you DO want to pursue it, reach out to comic colorists and offer to flat for them. Audition. Then go from there.
I'm glad I found this. I was looking for a way to shorten (imo) the most boring part of the process. Hand-coloring everything made sense when it was all traditional, but now I'm working digital. Might not do the same approach of making everything a different color. I'm working with a limited palette, so a lot of things are just going to be the same color.
I've colored a lot of stuff, but never knew the bit about going from big to small in making the selections for the flats. Duh. Hugely sensible. Thanks!
thanks for the vid, i’m planning on getting back to being a flatter this is a good refresher for me. I used to flat for a studio where i did my internship. I did the flats for Street Clothes by Travis Holyfield and some Marvel and GI Joe comics mostly by either Harvey Tolibao or Von Randal.
I really love your classes. I started coloring and sometimes i get confused with it, but you explain everything so good i can't have doubts. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge^^
＊ This is really useful! I’m making a comic right now and I’m mostly using flat colors (since I’m doing it mostly by myself). I wouldn’t have known to do a lot of these things, so thank you for making this video!
Hi there. At around 8:15 you say you dont need to trace the entire outline because of the way your tools are set up. Do you mind talking about what settings you have to have in order for this to be the case? Thanks!
That was a great tutorial straight to the point with good info, I am a Penciler and the way the market is I am needed to do more and more of the work. You are very on point and that is great.
This seems so much easier than the channeling method. Flatting always seems so daunting because I couldn't understand how channels worked, but this is much easier to understand
"Do her", hehe. One question: As a colorist, do you ever fix errors in the line art? For instance, the guy you flattened first had a large gap between his neck and ear. Is it up to you to fix that, or do you ask first, or just leave it alone?
Hi ! Thanks a lot for this video. I'm flatting a lot and I use quite the same method. 2 principal differences are : - I use the polygnal lasso and press alt to switch to the free one. In this way, the selection doesn't close if your pen has no more contact with the tablet. - Futhermore, by default, I check the "additionnal selection", so I can select several parts and fill them in once. (contiguous must be unchecked) I appreciate a lot your channel. Thanks a lot for this share.
if I ever finish my comic idea I'm going to give you a special mention, I learn alot from your vids....I've only managed 6 pages in a year though so don't get too excited lol.
Great tip about the alt (opt) and space bar - Thanks Oh WOW - I've just sussed (worked out) how you did the selection and only part of it changed - You locked the paint layer pixels ! That's huge. Hmmmm ? Looking at it again you didn't - now I am confused - sorry whatever I'm doing it's working but then I am only on CS3 Great Tutorial !
Really helped now i learned how to do flats , thank you very much sir. I've done my flats, and duplicated flats layer renamed it to colors, changed the colors that i will use for final look, but still need to know what to do next, i wold like to see a complete page process on how you do light/shadows etc... and what should be done first and what last that would be good to see, thank you!
not a comic book flatter, but a newbie illustrator here, I'm used to flat with magic wand before and playing with its tolerance, then part by part i have to clear the white pixels for each edges after..which is tiring and time consuming.. I'm always having a trouble for the left out pixels under the lines. that why I came here to see how professionals do it properly, thanks man helps a lot,saves my time.
Hey sorry if it's a dumb question, but at 8:01, how do you fill the haircolor without affecting the background color when though it's included in the lasso?
If you look at his fill bucket settings at the top bar, the tolerance is set at 0, which means it will only fill the adjacent pixels if it is the exact same colour. The background colour and the skin colour is different, so it acts as a barrier and will not bleed into the background. The tolerance setting for the fill bucket tool ranges from 0-255, and as you increase it, it starts filling colours that are similar as well. I hope that helps and a good way to see how it works is to experiment with it yourself :)
So...Like how does he separate the colors so even when he selects over a different color on another part it does not change it when he uses the bucket tool?
can you explain your tool setup? are you talking about unchecking anti alias and contiguous? what about new selection vs, intersect, add or subtract selection. are those all unchecked?
Cainmak photoshop also can auto fill, I used to auto fill but then you get uncolored parts under the inks which can cause issues, that’s why you should do it by hand
My number one question about flatting: It's the flatters job to differentiate the characters, so characters with the same skin tone or hair color will have different colors right? But what about uniforms? Like the Fantastic 4, in which they all wear the same blue jumpsuits? Or Johnny Storm and Sue Storm are designed to have the same exact skin and hair? Should the flatter really choose different colors to represent each jumpsuits in the team? Or can they rely on the colorists knowing that they all wear the same color? Or would that tick them off.
I'm a complete novice to this so this may be a dumb question but why not make the initial selections from B&W line art using the magic wand with contiguous unchecked & save yourself all that tracing? It's what I do & I've not found any problems? But there must be a reason the experts don't do this? Thanks for all the video's KMR, they were entry into digital colouring but I didn't continue with it. Until now, hence I came here for a refresher.
It just doesn't work as well as you might think -- especially on anything other than perfectly crispy clean line art with closed shapes--which is pretty rare to be honest.
@@colorwithkurt Yeah, I'm sure it has it's limitations. As I said I am just starting out & bowing before a master. Thanks for all the stuff you share with us though dude. My only motive for commenting really was in the spirit of sharing thoughts & ideas as you & others so generously do. You & others like you have saved people like me years of frustration with the things you share with us so many thanks as always.
Hello Mr. Russell! I was trying to follow your tutorial but I found a different setting out of my lasso tool: when I press the space bar it doesn't go straight but turns into hand tool.. Is there some setting I didn't set properly, or there some step I missed? Thank you for your helpful tutorial!
Same happened to me. I Googled and I found this: To switch between freehand and straight edge segments, Alt-click (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) and click where the segments should start and end. Good luck!
you're so cool. and it totally looks like you love what you do! thanks for teaching me and a whole lot of other persons how to color a comic book in a proper way!
awesome, pretty much the way I ended up doing em for myself. (although im starting to get antsy about the time spent flatting lol. I'm drawing the pages and working in BW + tone) The only other thing is I'll keep copies of the flat layers at varying complexity to allow me to select large areas quickly, max 4-5. so the first one is prob just whole figures and bg, and the last will be full complexity with small details. I like to be able to grab bold elements of the composition/scene as quickly as smaller parts.
That's one part, yes. I guess where I was heading was that if you do everything yourself, and would make only digital version, and wanted to save time, would it be possible to just fill with bucket, since the size is so small,that one couldn't see the edges.That said, I AM flatting.
Hey K Michael Russell, great tutorial! Thank you so much. In time: Do you have any tutorial about how to scan and clean up the lineart before coloring?
Kurt, before the artwork is printed, the file is flattened right? So there would be no white colour behind anything. So how would the issue you talk about occur? I'm not saying you're wrong of course! I just can't figure it out. And thank you so much for your videos! They're amazing! Saving money to take your course for the full experience! Can't wait!
I'm curious how you managed to select her shirt and yet it selected every panel that shirt was in. That's super helpful. Is that another action you made?
I really appreciate the videos you're making. I don't check them all out, but the ones I've seen have been very helpful. I have some questions about flatting though, based on what I've seen. When you're getting something ready for print, don't you flatten or merge the layers? Wouldn't this eliminate any issues with white spaces appearing? When I've watched some videos (not necessarily yours), people tend to overlap their color flats. How do you clean this up? No one seems to cover this in any videos I've seen. Thanks for your help!
It seems like a lot of people do it the way you explained it. So, that either means it's the right way or, as you mentioned, an old way that people haven't let go of. I'm trying to do my own comic and I have the whole thing colored. But then I watched a number of videos and thought I might not be doing it right. At the very least, it seems the colors are better when doing it the way I've seen in videos. By overlapping, I mean they'll "color outside the lines" so that, if you were coloring Superman, the blue of his costume will go outside of his figure. These videos never explain how to clean that up. I'm assuming it would be the eraser tool, but a lot of what I thought would work is being questioned now. Also, why can't you use the want tool and then just fill in? It seems like it gets the same results as using a brush, especially if the layers will be flattened into one for print. Another thing that came to mind is the issue of working in cmyk. I think you mentioned in one of your videos to use that, but I was wondering about a couple things. It's been awhile since I colored my comic, but I think I recall going straight to RGB. Videos I've seen have converted to greyscale first, and then either went to RGB or, in your case, to CMYK. Is there any reason why you do greyscale first and then another mode? Also, if you start out in RGB, have you heard about using to option to convert to profile instead of changing to CMYK by going under image/mode? I know that's a lot, and I appreciate any insight you can give. Thanks again.
I flat using the pen tool sometimes, but I find it to be more time consuming, and all I gain is the ability to make multiple selections and not have to worry about accidentally erasing them by forgetting to hold down shift, (although ctrl-z alleviates that worry as well, so idk)
Thanks for all your videos! They are great! I have a question... I am not able to do the changing between the polygonal lasso tool and the free hand lasso tool... Although I press alt..it just remains the same as before...Do I have to work with some settings? In my photoshop, I can see the sign of the lasso tools when I make the selection, not the cross, as in your video...
Great video! Thanks. (I've edited out my dumb questions, so I look smarter). Somehow this process seems very satisfying. I'm gonna find me some digital coloringbooks to mess around with. :) I'm guessing this is done in 300dpi for printing purposes? For the actual artist, does every selection have to be in a different color? For example, does the eye-color from one person have to be different from the other so you can individually select them? (I guess that would make sense). Thanks again man.
Awesome man you helped me a lot but just one question and I'm sorry for my ignorance. When you have the panel all colored with one color, why don't you just pick the bucket and paint all the parts with the color you want?
I see, thank so much. I'm a penciler and inker for comics and I wanted to learn how to color my pages as well, your videos are great. I'm a fan of your work.
+K Michael Russell and one more question. In PS CC, when I am using the lasso, and I press space bar hoping to get the hand, I'm getting the magnifier. Is this a setting I can change? I can't move around when zoomed in. I am using option to make straight lines, but I don't think that matters...
Combining fill bucket and lasso tool is not something I'd previously considered. Need to think about how to inject this into my shortcut set up... will want to quickly flip between lasso, fill bucket and lasso fill on the fly. (I have no idea why clip hides a fill tool away in the vector lines tab where NO ONE is going to look for it.)
(NOTE: This comment is from a digital amateur who usually colors traditionally and has only done some very limited digital coloring in the past four or five years, so expect high naïveté). If it's straight lines you're wanting, why not just use the polygonal lasso (as opposed to holding Alt the entire time)?
I think I got confused. You changed the color of the figure and that's why you don't have to trace it again. Okay, got that. I'm practicing with a random commission. But I haven't been able to successfully trace it. I keep messing up. Every time I use the lasso and press the alt key it doesn't turn into a straight line. It just stays the same.
I usually flat the base color and then clip mask layers for each color the rest but I've noticed you flat everything in one layer. Why do you recommend doing it that way?
I designed a piece on my laptop and when I viewed it on my mobile it was warmer and had more contrast. I've asked this before but no one gave the solution instead explained the problem. How can I get accurate colors while designing it on my laptop?
I´ve just learnt something new thanks to your video. 1- We share a similar name mr K Michael Russell (K Michael Rowsell) 2- That flatting exists and how to do it porperly!
Awesome!.. around 7:45 he works on the guys hair and he says theres already a seperation established because of how his tools are set up......Im fuzzy on this..
I just thought of a great idea! Maybe it’s been done before. I’m new to comics and have never made one, so I’m speaking with great authority here. 😒 If you do your own flats, you could totally use them as a color script for your whole project, to set the mood of your scenes before getting into the details of the color and rendering!
Flats are not a creative part of the process. The colors are irrelevant at that stage since the flats are intended to be used for selecting things only. Whether you do them yourself or not isn't relevant. The colorist must set the base colors themselves in any case. The colors the flatter chooses don't end up on the page.
@@colorwithkurt thanks for your reply. You explained flats really well in your video, so feel I have a good understanding of what they are for, I just thought it could be used in the way I described to kill two birds with one stone. I know that most comics are serial, so maybe setting a color script for a whole comic story line isn’t necessary or even possible, but when you color your projects do you think of the color mood throughout every scene for the entirety of the story? Or do you color one page at time without thinking of how it relates to the story as a whole? I know they do color scripts in animation so the color of each scene contributes to the story telling, just wondering if comic artists use that same process and where it fits in the work flow, do you have any thoughts on that? I think I may use it that way in my projects.
Hi this might be a super newbie question but it would be most appreciated if you could answer it. I want to start flatting for other artists but I don’t have photoshop I have an iPad and procreate. Will I have to use a special file specific to photoshop or does the file type even matter? I really just want to know if using 2 different apps will affect file compatibility.
I'm curious, is there an advantage to using the Bucket tool over Command Delete (Control Delete on a PC, I think)? On Mac, when I have a selection to fill I hit Command Delete and it fills the selection with the background color. It seems faster to me because A. I don't have to switch tools, B. I don't have to move my pointer inside the selection and click, and C. I can just move on to my next selection with the Lasso tool. The drawback is selecting another color and having to switch it to the background color with X.
This is what I have always done too, and only now realized the benefit of using the bucket tool. Because the bucket tool has a colour tolerance, and doesn't just fill the whole selection. For example when K Michael Russel selects the character's hair, and he just does a wide selection over the BG to close the selection. He can do this because he uses the paintbucket to fill. So it may take longer to perform the fill, but it saves time because you do not need to refine your selection as much.
Great Tutorial! One question though, is how come you put all of the flats on one layer, rather than each colour on different layers and labelled appropriately (example: backgrounder layer, skin layer, etc..)? Is that a personal preference thing, or is there a reason it's good to put the flats all on one layer? Thanks! :)
+K Michael Russell I can't really think of a reason why other than that's how I've always seen it done in the past. immediately I thought of things like "well to keep it all separate and easier to colour!" but I guess that doesn't need to be the case. It seems to work well for you though, Im really enjoying your tutorials :)
I'd assume it's because your flats layer here is functionally 1 layer. A contrast would be a sort of hierarchy design- Panel 1 > Panel 1 Hair, Panel 1 Skin, Panel 1 Background, Panel 1 Eyes, Panel 1 Teeth..... and so forth. That ends up being a ton of layers, which, you might get away with on a modern high-end computer. But a lot of the folks teaching this stuff learned in the industry years ago when RAM was much more expensive. Perhaps more than "expensive" if they learned prior to say 2006- when 64 bit consumer operating systems started to become popular (and thus you could physically address more than 4GB of RAM). Each of those neatly-labeled layers has a blotch of some flat color, then a sprawling field of alpha transparency. So what you get is a tremendous amount of RAM utilization- eating up all the swap space on your PC to do a typical comic page, stacked atop memories costs of undo history. It might work if you've built a beast with 128GB of RAM, but on a more common office computer, it's going to lag or crash. So this workflow is sort of a holdover to the days when a PC only had 512MB or 1GB of RAM to hold all the layers of your print image- and since these artists who teach have learned a particular workflow, they transmit what they know whole-stock: the good meaningful, sensible stuff and the stuff that's just sort of tradition.
so is it best to turn off antialiasing? ((I generally use medibang paint so I guess I"m not sure if the options/etc. work the same on photoshop but basically-- in the end, at least, it looked like it was all-or-nothing on the pixels, which makes sense for optimized selection, is that recommended? It doesn't end up causing any problems?))
Awesome video! Been working for years by myself doing this and just learned the term "flatter" today. Great discussion/explanation. Question: So I've got my page flat-ed, and I want to select a shape and change it's color in Hue/Saturation panel. If I make a big change like red to green, there are 'lost' pixels where they meet, at the shape borders. I find this true using both the lasso tool or using the brush tool (set at 100% hardness). For the most part, these borders are covered up by the inks, outlines, etc., but sometimes not. It seems to limit the whole usefulness of flatting, though I'm still using it daily. Any thoughts?
Heya, I have a question. Been following your videos and Im in the process of flatting a number of pages, but Im running into an issue. I put one big flat on the whole page, then I put flats on each of the panels. Then when I go inside a panel to drill down and continue flatting, and I use the lasso tool and go outside to boundary where there's another color and I fill, it overlaps that color. What am I doing wrong, because as of now I have to basically retrace the edge so Im wasting time I thought I had saved. Thanks.
Yah just dont put a flat on the whole page, just do panels and drill inside each of them. Then when page is fully flatted you can magic wand the empty space and give it a color if you want.
@@Flo-cw2we ok, but maybe my problem is quite different. I'm talking about flattering a single panel. I follow step by step the tutorial, I put a color on the whole panel (from biggest to smallest) but this I try to select the caracter (that's already covered with the background colour) to change its color and If I don't rectrace its line, the new color will cover the first one. So I have to retrace all the shapes.
Hi when I color it in, it doesn't end at the dark lines like yours. So I have to painfully trace everything instead going around some areas. How do you do it? :(
When I flat my images, I tend to get these pixels in between different flat colors, which makes it hard to use the blender brush when I'm rendering. How can I avoid this so the flats look clean like this? 17:10
Thank for sharing this, unfortunate for me I found and paid for a course teaching the wrong way example and that’s how I’ve been working the past few months. And yeah flatting has been murder.
Love the video and your channel. I am also looking at your courses. I am curious though, how does one find someone to flat for? I don't think I have ever seen a call out for flatters or maybe I've just missed it.
To answer everyone asking about the settings on the tools... they are at the top of the screen. Uncheck all the settings on the lasso and bucket tool.
Question... can't you just use Medibang Paint or ClipStudio Paint Bucket Fill tool, which lets you expand your fill over lineart by couple pixels, and doesn't escape through gaps? Just remember to on a new layer below your 'main' flats also fill empty space 'within' the thicker lines/blacks to create rich black?
There are a lot of ways to do all of this in various apps. In my experience, most professional art isn't drawn in a way that makes "special" fill tools like that faster.
@@colorwithkurt Another question: does the color of the flats under the lineart matter? I mean, actual colorist will not actually touch that in the end, it's just there to create rich black as far as I understand...
Rich black doesn't have anything to do it as far as I know. The flats layer is there for selections only.
@@colorwithkurt Oh, okay. Interesting. I guess I've been misinformed.
I cannot like this enough. Been going through several dozen videos about digital colouring and no one was showing useful flatting info. They all skipped that to get right to the fancier stuff and it's pretty critical when you're brand new. Thanks so much for this!
Flatting technique:
Go from the biggest shapes (like the whole panel) to the smallest (the eyes) to make sure there are no ways for white gaps.
So glad I found this video. I'm not a flatter or colorist, but trying to do flatting for myself on my own comic and I see where I'm messing up and wasting time. This is such a time-saver. You're very good at teaching as well. Subscribed now, thanks!
Psh, I know how to flat...
*watches video*
So much more efficient than what I've been doing Dx
Ah yes, I remember flatting for about 7 different colorists. Most time-consuming part of the process. Actually got my mom to flat with me and we could turn books out pretty fast! :-)
Hello I know this is 3 years ago but is there an efficient way to find work as a flatter?
@@telavia577 Unless you like working 6-8 hours a day for $5-10 a page, forget it. Fast way to get burned out. But if you DO want to pursue it, reach out to comic colorists and offer to flat for them. Audition. Then go from there.
Sounds like the flatting experience! Thanks for your time in the trenches. :)
I'm glad I found this. I was looking for a way to shorten (imo) the most boring part of the process. Hand-coloring everything made sense when it was all traditional, but now I'm working digital. Might not do the same approach of making everything a different color. I'm working with a limited palette, so a lot of things are just going to be the same color.
I use flats of different colors even if working in black and white. :) It saves a lot of time.
Finally someone who knows what they're talking about. lol
I've colored a lot of stuff, but never knew the bit about going from big to small in making the selections for the flats. Duh. Hugely sensible. Thanks!
thanks for the vid, i’m planning on getting back to being a flatter this is a good refresher for me. I used to flat for a studio where i did my internship. I did the flats for Street Clothes by Travis Holyfield and some Marvel and GI Joe comics mostly by either Harvey Tolibao or Von Randal.
Still the best flatting tutorial on UA-cam
An oldie but a goodie. :)
I really love your classes. I started coloring and sometimes i get confused with it, but you explain everything so good i can't have doubts. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge^^
I’ve fallen down a colouring rabbit hole here. You’re awesome. (Ps, it was nice sitting next to you at Thought Bubble! Thank you for the tips.)
＊ This is really useful! I’m making a comic right now and I’m mostly using flat colors (since I’m doing it mostly by myself). I wouldn’t have known to do a lot of these things, so thank you for making this video!
Hi there. At around 8:15 you say you dont need to trace the entire outline because of the way your tools are set up. Do you mind talking about what settings you have to have in order for this to be the case? Thanks!
same problem. Did you resolve this trouble?
That was a great tutorial straight to the point with good info, I am a Penciler and the way the market is I am needed to do more and more of the work. You are very on point and that is great.
What tool settings did you use so you didn’t have to reselect?
thank you so much.. ive seen other tutorials but you went into a true lesson.
This seems so much easier than the channeling method. Flatting always seems so daunting because I couldn't understand how channels worked, but this is much easier to understand
"Do her", hehe.
One question: As a colorist, do you ever fix errors in the line art? For instance, the guy you flattened first had a large gap between his neck and ear. Is it up to you to fix that, or do you ask first, or just leave it alone?
Hi !
Thanks a lot for this video.
I'm flatting a lot and I use quite the same method.
2 principal differences are :
- I use the polygnal lasso and press alt to switch to the free one. In this way, the selection doesn't close if your pen has no more contact with the tablet.
- Futhermore, by default, I check the "additionnal selection", so I can select several parts and fill them in once. (contiguous must be unchecked)
I appreciate a lot your channel. Thanks a lot for this share.
if I ever finish my comic idea I'm going to give you a special mention, I learn alot from your vids....I've only managed 6 pages in a year though so don't get too excited lol.
Great tip about the alt (opt) and space bar - Thanks
Oh WOW - I've just sussed (worked out) how you did the selection
and only part of it changed - You locked the paint layer pixels ! That's huge.
Hmmmm ? Looking at it again you didn't - now I am confused - sorry
whatever I'm doing it's working but then I am only on CS3
Great Tutorial !
Really helped now i learned how to do flats , thank you very much sir. I've done my flats, and duplicated flats layer renamed it to colors, changed the colors that i will use for final look, but still need to know what to do next, i wold like to see a complete page process on how you do light/shadows etc... and what should be done first and what last that would be good to see, thank you!
not a comic book flatter, but a newbie illustrator here, I'm used to flat with magic wand before and playing with its tolerance, then part by part i have to clear the white pixels for each edges after..which is tiring and time consuming.. I'm always having a trouble for the left out pixels under the lines. that why I came here to see how professionals do it properly, thanks man helps a lot,saves my time.
You can use the magic wand tool. You just have to expand the selections by a couple pixels before you fill so the colors sit behind the lines.
That makes sense. I only speak from experience coloring my own work.
Hey sorry if it's a dumb question, but at 8:01, how do you fill the haircolor without affecting the background color when though it's included in the lasso?
yes, can somebody help? i still confused here :(
If you look at his fill bucket settings at the top bar, the tolerance is set at 0, which means it will only fill the adjacent pixels if it is the exact same colour. The background colour and the skin colour is different, so it acts as a barrier and will not bleed into the background. The tolerance setting for the fill bucket tool ranges from 0-255, and as you increase it, it starts filling colours that are similar as well. I hope that helps and a good way to see how it works is to experiment with it yourself :)
@@SentientCookie for me doesn't work. I deselected everything from lasso and from bucket and tolerance is 0 but nothing changes.
So...Like how does he separate the colors so even when he selects over a different color on another part it does not change it when he uses the bucket tool?
See the pinned comment on this video.
can you explain your tool setup? are you talking about unchecking anti alias and contiguous?
what about new selection vs, intersect, add or subtract selection. are those all unchecked?
How do you color two different color objects over a background? I get background color showing up between the two.
Best, most professional flatting tutorial I’ve seen. Thanks!
Where can I go to get a job as a flatter? I"ve been practicing it for about two years or so now and I think I've gotten good enough at it.
I have been working as a flatter for some months and now I've discovered that I was making a lot of mistakes xD Thank you very much!!
I'm kinda glad I use Krita because it has a color auto-fill option. Still makes mistakes, but it's better than doing everything by hand IMO.
Cainmak photoshop also can auto fill, I used to auto fill but then you get uncolored parts under the inks which can cause issues, that’s why you should do it by hand
Do you have any tips for flatting comics with traditional mediums, namely (in my case) alcohol markers and ink?
Saving money to do your course. Thanks a lot for the tips, Mr. Russel! 😊
My number one question about flatting:
It's the flatters job to differentiate the characters, so characters with the same skin tone or hair color will have different colors right? But what about uniforms? Like the Fantastic 4, in which they all wear the same blue jumpsuits? Or Johnny Storm and Sue Storm are designed to have the same exact skin and hair? Should the flatter really choose different colors to represent each jumpsuits in the team? Or can they rely on the colorists knowing that they all wear the same color? Or would that tick them off.
I'm a complete novice to this so this may be a dumb question but why not make the initial selections from B&W line art using the magic wand with contiguous unchecked & save yourself all that tracing? It's what I do & I've not found any problems? But there must be a reason the experts don't do this? Thanks for all the video's KMR, they were entry into digital colouring but I didn't continue with it. Until now, hence I came here for a refresher.
It just doesn't work as well as you might think -- especially on anything other than perfectly crispy clean line art with closed shapes--which is pretty rare to be honest.
@@colorwithkurt Yeah, I'm sure it has it's limitations. As I said I am just starting out & bowing before a master. Thanks for all the stuff you share with us though dude. My only motive for commenting really was in the spirit of sharing thoughts & ideas as you & others so generously do. You & others like you have saved people like me years of frustration with the things you share with us so many thanks as always.
No problem at all. Thanks for asking!
This was a game changer for me. Do you have anything in Procreate.?
how are the settings set for the lasso tool? would really help and make things faster. Thanks
Everything is unchecked on the lasso.
Hello Mr. Russell!
I was trying to follow your tutorial but I found a different setting out of my lasso tool: when I press the space bar it doesn't go straight but turns into hand tool.. Is there some setting I didn't set properly, or there some step I missed?
Thank you for your helpful tutorial!
this might be SUUUPER late but check the shift button!
Same happened to me. I Googled and I found this: To switch between freehand and straight edge segments, Alt-click (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) and click where the segments should start and end. Good luck!
you're so cool. and it totally looks like you love what you do! thanks for teaching me and a whole lot of other persons how to color a comic book in a proper way!
awesome, pretty much the way I ended up doing em for myself. (although im starting to get antsy about the time spent flatting lol. I'm drawing the pages and working in BW + tone) The only other thing is I'll keep copies of the flat layers at varying complexity to allow me to select large areas quickly, max 4-5. so the first one is prob just whole figures and bg, and the last will be full complexity with small details. I like to be able to grab bold elements of the composition/scene as quickly as smaller parts.
whos the artist that made the drawing line art? ps dont know if its yourself I have to say its great
That's one part, yes. I guess where I was heading was that if you do everything yourself, and would make only digital version, and wanted to save time, would it be possible to just fill with bucket, since the size is so small,that one couldn't see the edges.That said, I AM flatting.
Man ! I have landed upon gold !
Subbed instantly. Thx.
Thank you so much for your help and thank you for giving us tutorials
Hey K Michael Russell, great tutorial! Thank you so much.
In time: Do you have any tutorial about how to scan and clean up the lineart before coloring?
+K Michael Russell, thanks for the reply! I'm going to check it right now!
Thanks for the video. Will this technique work as well with earlier versions of Photoshop?
Kurt, before the artwork is printed, the file is flattened right? So there would be no white colour behind anything. So how would the issue you talk about occur? I'm not saying you're wrong of course! I just can't figure it out.
And thank you so much for your videos! They're amazing! Saving money to take your course for the full experience! Can't wait!
This might be less of an issue these days. It's what I was taught but may or may not be an issue for modern printers.
thanks for this tutorial. how did you set up your tools for selections without having to retrace?
+K Michael Russell thanks for the response and helpful videos! I will watch tonight!
Just what the doctor ordered. Thanks for this trick.
what is the answer?! :)
I'm curious how you managed to select her shirt and yet it selected every panel that shirt was in. That's super helpful. Is that another action you made?
Make sure your wand settings are like mine. Uncheck contiguous.
I really appreciate the videos you're making. I don't check them all out, but the ones I've seen have been very helpful. I have some questions about flatting though, based on what I've seen.
When you're getting something ready for print, don't you flatten or merge the layers? Wouldn't this eliminate any issues with white spaces appearing?
When I've watched some videos (not necessarily yours), people tend to overlap their color flats. How do you clean this up? No one seems to cover this in any videos I've seen.
Thanks for your help!
It seems like a lot of people do it the way you explained it. So, that either means it's the right way or, as you mentioned, an old way that people haven't let go of.
I'm trying to do my own comic and I have the whole thing colored. But then I watched a number of videos and thought I might not be doing it right. At the very least, it seems the colors are better when doing it the way I've seen in videos.
By overlapping, I mean they'll "color outside the lines" so that, if you were coloring Superman, the blue of his costume will go outside of his figure. These videos never explain how to clean that up. I'm assuming it would be the eraser tool, but a lot of what I thought would work is being questioned now.
Also, why can't you use the want tool and then just fill in? It seems like it gets the same results as using a brush, especially if the layers will be flattened into one for print.
Another thing that came to mind is the issue of working in cmyk. I think you mentioned in one of your videos to use that, but I was wondering about a couple things.
It's been awhile since I colored my comic, but I think I recall going straight to RGB. Videos I've seen have converted to greyscale first, and then either went to RGB or, in your case, to CMYK.
Is there any reason why you do greyscale first and then another mode? Also, if you start out in RGB, have you heard about using to option to convert to profile instead of changing to CMYK by going under image/mode?
I know that's a lot, and I appreciate any insight you can give. Thanks again.
What about people using the lasso and brush tool vs using the wand and paint bucket tool? Why do you use the former instead of the latter?
Thanks! Exactly what I need to know.
Would you happen to have any advice on how to find work as a flatter?
Questions:
1. Is ti ok if I use pentool instead of the lasso tool?
2. Is your style of selscting only works on CS6 or higher version of Photoshop?
I flat using the pen tool sometimes, but I find it to be more time consuming, and all I gain is the ability to make multiple selections and not have to worry about accidentally erasing them by forgetting to hold down shift, (although ctrl-z alleviates that worry as well, so idk)
This is pretty easy! I have a question. For other programs such as correl paint and medibang does it work pretty much the same way?
and thanks a million for you marvelous work on spiderman! pages are sparkling 😍😍😍
Whos the artist that made the line art which is excellent and what comic is? thanx in advance great tutorials.
how much do you pay flatters? never knew that was a thing.
Thanks for all your videos! They are great!
I have a question... I am not able to do the changing between the polygonal lasso tool and the free hand lasso tool... Although I press alt..it just remains the same as before...Do I have to work with some settings? In my photoshop, I can see the sign of the lasso tools when I make the selection, not the cross, as in your video...
How does your lasso tool work, to only select that lighter blue? You're doing it all on the same layer, right?
Ah--I see it explained here: ua-cam.com/video/fGoAeMkv4sA/v-deo.html
Thanks for the tutorials!
Thank you very much Mr. Russel, your tutorials are very helpful
Great video! Thanks.
(I've edited out my dumb questions, so I look smarter).
Somehow this process seems very satisfying. I'm gonna find me some digital coloringbooks to mess around with. :)
I'm guessing this is done in 300dpi for printing purposes?
For the actual artist, does every selection have to be in a different color? For example, does the eye-color from one person have to be different from the other so you can individually select them? (I guess that would make sense).
Thanks again man.
Awesome man you helped me a lot but just one question and I'm sorry for my ignorance. When you have the panel all colored with one color, why don't you just pick the bucket and paint all the parts with the color you want?
I see, thank so much. I'm a penciler and inker for comics and I wanted to learn how to color my pages as well, your videos are great. I'm a fan of your work.
Great tutorials, thank you! I was wondering- if you would do a comic only in digital format- would you still do the flattening?
+K Michael Russell righty right..i wrote that with my morning coffee.. I've read in couple of places that, it's basically done for printing only?
no, i know what flattening layers is. : )
How do I set up the layer so that when I make a selection and fill it, it doesn’t go over the selection of the character?
+K Michael Russell and one more question. In PS CC, when I am using the lasso, and I press space bar hoping to get the hand, I'm getting the magnifier. Is this a setting I can change? I can't move around when zoomed in. I am using option to make straight lines, but I don't think that matters...
Combining fill bucket and lasso tool is not something I'd previously considered. Need to think about how to inject this into my shortcut set up... will want to quickly flip between lasso, fill bucket and lasso fill on the fly. (I have no idea why clip hides a fill tool away in the vector lines tab where NO ONE is going to look for it.)
All of those tools are mapped to shortcuts on my left hand. I never have to leave the canvas to select them.
(NOTE: This comment is from a digital amateur who usually colors traditionally and has only done some very limited digital coloring in the past four or five years, so expect high naïveté).
If it's straight lines you're wanting, why not just use the polygonal lasso (as opposed to holding Alt the entire time)?
Ohh, that hadn’t occurred to me. Thank you!
I just understand. I unchecked all the setting for the lasso but I still have to trace when I specifically want to color something.
I think I got confused. You changed the color of the figure and that's why you don't have to trace it again. Okay, got that. I'm practicing with a random commission. But I haven't been able to successfully trace it. I keep messing up. Every time I use the lasso and press the alt key it doesn't turn into a straight line. It just stays the same.
@@cameronshrader1223 same problem. I have to retrace all the sections. Did you resolve this issue?
I usually flat the base color and then clip mask layers for each color the rest but I've noticed you flat everything in one layer. Why do you recommend doing it that way?
Thanks for the great tutorial, but Who is the penciler of that page ?
Jonathan Brandon Sawyer
I designed a piece on my laptop and when I viewed it on my mobile it was warmer and had more contrast. I've asked this before but no one gave the solution instead explained the problem. How can I get accurate colors while designing it on my laptop?
The only thing I would know to do is to buy a monitor color calibrator. I have a Spyder 5.
I´ve just learnt something new thanks to your video.
1- We share a similar name mr K Michael Russell (K Michael Rowsell)
2- That flatting exists and how to do it porperly!
I learned alot! Thank you!
Awesome!.. around 7:45 he works on the guys hair and he says theres already a seperation established because of how his tools are set up......Im fuzzy on this..
+K Michael Russell You literally just blew my mind with this tip. lol
+K Michael Russell no joke: all my classmates gathered around my computer to see and they freaked too lol!
+K Michael Russell graphic design, but they only teach you superficial photo touch up garbage which is no fun
I just thought of a great idea! Maybe it’s been done before. I’m new to comics and have never made one, so I’m speaking with great authority here. 😒 If you do your own flats, you could totally use them as a color script for your whole project, to set the mood of your scenes before getting into the details of the color and rendering!
Flats are not a creative part of the process. The colors are irrelevant at that stage since the flats are intended to be used for selecting things only.
Whether you do them yourself or not isn't relevant. The colorist must set the base colors themselves in any case. The colors the flatter chooses don't end up on the page.
@@colorwithkurt thanks for your reply. You explained flats really well in your video, so feel I have a good understanding of what they are for, I just thought it could be used in the way I described to kill two birds with one stone. I know that most comics are serial, so maybe setting a color script for a whole comic story line isn’t necessary or even possible, but when you color your projects do you think of the color mood throughout every scene for the entirety of the story? Or do you color one page at time without thinking of how it relates to the story as a whole? I know they do color scripts in animation so the color of each scene contributes to the story telling, just wondering if comic artists use that same process and where it fits in the work flow, do you have any thoughts on that? I think I may use it that way in my projects.
It's a standard part of the colorists job to have a color plan based on the story.
@@colorwithkurt yeah I figured, just was wondering how that worked its way into the workflow of a colorist. Thanks man! Your videos are super helpful!
Are you doing Flats on Photoshop or Procreate nowadays?
Hi this might be a super newbie question but it would be most appreciated if you could answer it. I want to start flatting for other artists but I don’t have photoshop I have an iPad and procreate. Will I have to use a special file specific to photoshop or does the file type even matter? I really just want to know if using 2 different apps will affect file compatibility.
I'm curious, is there an advantage to using the Bucket tool over Command Delete (Control Delete on a PC, I think)? On Mac, when I have a selection to fill I hit Command Delete and it fills the selection with the background color. It seems faster to me because A. I don't have to switch tools, B. I don't have to move my pointer inside the selection and click, and C. I can just move on to my next selection with the Lasso tool. The drawback is selecting another color and having to switch it to the background color with X.
True, in Photoshop there's usually four different ways to do the same thing. :) Everyone figures out what works for them.
This is what I have always done too, and only now realized the benefit of using the bucket tool. Because the bucket tool has a colour tolerance, and doesn't just fill the whole selection. For example when K Michael Russel selects the character's hair, and he just does a wide selection over the BG to close the selection. He can do this because he uses the paintbucket to fill.
So it may take longer to perform the fill, but it saves time because you do not need to refine your selection as much.
Great Tutorial!
One question though, is how come you put all of the flats on one layer, rather than each colour on different layers and labelled appropriately (example: backgrounder layer, skin layer, etc..)?
Is that a personal preference thing, or is there a reason it's good to put the flats all on one layer?
Thanks! :)
+K Michael Russell I can't really think of a reason why other than that's how I've always seen it done in the past. immediately I thought of things like "well to keep it all separate and easier to colour!" but I guess that doesn't need to be the case. It seems to work well for you though, Im really enjoying your tutorials :)
I'd assume it's because your flats layer here is functionally 1 layer. A contrast would be a sort of hierarchy design- Panel 1 > Panel 1 Hair, Panel 1 Skin, Panel 1 Background, Panel 1 Eyes, Panel 1 Teeth..... and so forth. That ends up being a ton of layers, which, you might get away with on a modern high-end computer. But a lot of the folks teaching this stuff learned in the industry years ago when RAM was much more expensive. Perhaps more than "expensive" if they learned prior to say 2006- when 64 bit consumer operating systems started to become popular (and thus you could physically address more than 4GB of RAM). Each of those neatly-labeled layers has a blotch of some flat color, then a sprawling field of alpha transparency. So what you get is a tremendous amount of RAM utilization- eating up all the swap space on your PC to do a typical comic page, stacked atop memories costs of undo history. It might work if you've built a beast with 128GB of RAM, but on a more common office computer, it's going to lag or crash. So this workflow is sort of a holdover to the days when a PC only had 512MB or 1GB of RAM to hold all the layers of your print image- and since these artists who teach have learned a particular workflow, they transmit what they know whole-stock: the good meaningful, sensible stuff and the stuff that's just sort of tradition.
so is it best to turn off antialiasing? ((I generally use medibang paint so I guess I"m not sure if the options/etc. work the same on photoshop but basically-- in the end, at least, it looked like it was all-or-nothing on the pixels, which makes sense for optimized selection, is that recommended? It doesn't end up causing any problems?))
I always keep AA off for flatting. It's a must there. For rendering, it's a preference, but I still would prefer AA personally.
Is there a certain website you use to get flattening jobs and to set up like your portfolio
Thank you so much for this! This is incredibly useful!
Do you use the mouse for the lasso tool?
Nope. Tablet. I mean you can, but it's way harder.
Awesome video! Been working for years by myself doing this and just learned the term "flatter" today. Great discussion/explanation.
Question: So I've got my page flat-ed, and I want to select a shape and change it's color in Hue/Saturation panel. If I make a big change like red to green, there are 'lost' pixels where they meet, at the shape borders. I find this true using both the lasso tool or using the brush tool (set at 100% hardness).
For the most part, these borders are covered up by the inks, outlines, etc., but sometimes not. It seems to limit the whole usefulness of flatting, though I'm still using it daily.
Any thoughts?
@@colorwithkurt You are the man! Had the zero feather going, but even though I've been using Ps for years, I had no idea about the anti-alias!
do you have a link to set the tool settings to be able to do this? please :)
To think, this is just a simple tutorial but makes a lot of sense, helps me alot! thank you so much! *subd
I love it! Great stuff!
Is this the same way in Clio Studio or can you link a video to the clip version.
Why don't the colors get one on another when you go "random" with the lazo, but stay in the black line?
This was so flippin usefull omdz thank you
Is it acceptable to do flatting using color channels instead of layers?
Thank you so much for making my life easier
Heya, I have a question. Been following your videos and Im in the process of flatting a number of pages, but Im running into an issue. I put one big flat on the whole page, then I put flats on each of the panels. Then when I go inside a panel to drill down and continue flatting, and I use the lasso tool and go outside to boundary where there's another color and I fill, it overlaps that color. What am I doing wrong, because as of now I have to basically retrace the edge so Im wasting time I thought I had saved. Thanks.
Hei, I have the same problem. Did you resolve it?
Yah just dont put a flat on the whole page, just do panels and drill inside each of them. Then when page is fully flatted you can magic wand the empty space and give it a color if you want.
@@Flo-cw2we ok, but maybe my problem is quite different. I'm talking about flattering a single panel. I follow step by step the tutorial, I put a color on the whole panel (from biggest to smallest) but this I try to select the caracter (that's already covered with the background colour) to change its color and If I don't rectrace its line, the new color will cover the first one. So I have to retrace all the shapes.
Hi when I color it in, it doesn't end at the dark lines like yours. So I have to painfully trace everything instead going around some areas. How do you do it? :(
When I flat my images, I tend to get these pixels in between different flat colors, which makes it hard to use the blender brush when I'm rendering. How can I avoid this so the flats look clean like this? 17:10
Why not just set the inks layer to reference and use the color fill instead of the selection tool?
That works great on clean line art but most of what I see isn't sharp enough.
Thank for sharing this, unfortunate for me I found and paid for a course teaching the wrong way example and that’s how I’ve been working the past few months. And yeah flatting has been murder.
Sorry to hear that. Glad this helped!
Love the video and your channel. I am also looking at your courses. I am curious though, how does one find someone to flat for? I don't think I have ever seen a call out for flatters or maybe I've just missed it.
Wow thanks for the quick reply and the suggestions. I will check it out, just started digitally colouring in Procreate in April of this year.
Awesome and thanks again.