Customer Reviews

Master Digital Color: Styles Tools Techniques

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After I bought Brian and Kristy Miller's first book, Hi-Fi Color For Comics: Digital Techniques for Professional Results, and went through the lessons, I remember thinking, "They've just got to make another book - there's so much more to learn!" For those of us who felt that way, the Millers' follow-up, "Master Digital Color" is a dream come true. Building directly off of the lessons taught in "Hi-Fi," this book expands the techniques taught both in complexity and utility.

Before we begin, I must warn you - to use this book you need to have a version of Photoshop (preferably CS or higher) and some sort of Wacom-style tablet.

The Good: While "Hi-Fi Color for Comics" taught the rudiments of the "cut & brush/grad" coloring style in exceptional detail, "Master Digital Color" goes deeper, taking those lessons and applying them to different styles of art and new techniques. Here, you'll work on everything from animation (Disney, Hanna-Barbara and action/adventure cartoon styles) and manga style art to pin-up, sci-fi, and, of course, advanced superhero comic coloring techniques. Want to learn how to render hair or figure out how to make a face look right? This is the book for you. Want to figure out how to render metallic objects, stone, brick, skies, etc? Again, this is your book. And that just scratches the surface.

There are six chapters (Animation, Superhero, Pin-Up, Sci-Fi, Manga and Alternative), and each chapter has three complete lessons (taking you all the way from flatting the art to rendering, color holds and special effects) and two "Challenge" homework assignments where you take what you learned in the lessons and try them yourself without any help. All of the lessons and homework assignments are contained on the accompanying DVD-ROM, along with color pallets for each lesson, video tutorials, "Hi-Fi Helpers" and Photoshop presets. While this DVD-ROM includes much of the content included on the disc that accompanied "Hi-Fi," you will still need to install this new disc because it also includes new material vital to the lessons. Installation, thankfully, is quick and easy.

The Photoshop Presets, like those in "Hi-Fi," include custom brushes, color settings, and automated actions and scripts to minimize the number of steps you have to go through to set up your files for each step in the coloring process. This is a major aid - though it would be nice if they told us all of the steps for file set-up just so we could try them out for ourselves.

The Bad: Not much, but there are a few little things. While there are a host of amazing techniques taught in this book, one that is not really covered is how to render musculature - while you will render colors over muscles in the lessons, there isn't any in-depth discussion (you'll need GURU-eFX's now out-of-print How To Color For Comics for that). Something else I would have liked to have seen is how to determine which "screen" color (the color you'll use to render and create highlights) you should use in your own art; there is little discussion of choosing colors, which you'd think would be essential. Also, I noticed some typos and editing errors in the book.

Now, the big question: If I buy this book, do I still need to buy the first one, Hi-Fi Color For Comics: Digital Techniques for Professional Results? I would say yes. "Hi-Fi" teaches the rudiments in great detail and, if you've never even flatted a page before or have little Photoshop experience, you will need "Hi-Fi" before you get this book. This book, though it does review some of "Hi-Fi's" rudiments in the beginning pages, assumes you've already read that book and done its lessons first. Just a friendly FYI.

All in all, "Master Digital Color" is a superb book for those interested in learning how to color in a comic book style on the computer, and raises the bar for such books yet again. I recommend it without hesitation. Good luck!

Other Helpful Books:

Digital Manga Workshop: An Artist's Guide to Creating Manga Illustrations on Your Computer

Fantasy Workshop: Mastering Digital Painting Techniques

Color Index: Over 1100 Color Combinations, CMYK and RGB Formulas, for Print and Web Media

Color Index 2: Over 1500 New Color Combinations. For Print and Web Media. CMYK and RGB Formulas.

This is a great sequel to Hi-Fi Color for Comics which I felt was a very informative digital coloring manual. There is a section of this book which explains how to use the Flats Channel to another degree to help give your project a more "animation" type feel. Also this book goes into more detail in how to render a figure's overall appearance to show the subtlety needed to give your character a realistic finish. I highly recommend this addition of Hi-Fi's great advice and tips.

I ordered this last week after purchasing Brian's first book "Hi Fi Color for comics" and was extremely amazed. This book is a great addition to the first. The CD alone that comes with the book is priceless. It has diffrent Photoshop styles and templates to help any digital artist (not just comic book stlye)! I loved the project studies, and was blown away by all the diffrent art techniques. "Master Digital Color" shows you such a wide spectrum of ways to color from Disney animation to comic book to pin up. If you you color anything digitally this (and the Hi Fi color for comics) is a must have in your library!!!

Very helpful book. I started with this book, but since I am a beginner, I decided to get Hi-Fi Color book. That would be the only con for the book and that is, you should probably start with their other book first and then move on to this one. They have great examples, a great DVD, and you can learn many different styles.

I love this book! If you want to know things like coloring comics like the classic Saturday morning cartoons to the silver screen dashing Marvel style it's in here! If you want to add shading to a pin-up it's in here! He even includes all his secret helpers as he calls them "photoshop actions, brushes, color swatches, scripts, tools" He gives you them and they are a valuable asset to my workflow now, they make things a whole lot easier.Everything is in intricate detail right down to the letter on the page. I like how he added cliff notes on most pages and how they relate to extra tips. All-in-all if you want to get ahead in the comic book industry or even your foot in the door so to speak or if you just wanted to tool around and relive the golden years when you used to color outside the lines when you were a little tyke this is the book for you. Like the man says on the cover "STYLES, TOOLS, TECHNIQUES You will MASTER DIGITAL COLOR!

This book was perfect was a newbie to digital coloring like me. I've invested in them all and this book was super helpful!!

If you are into comic book style coloring, or just wanting to better your skills as a graphic design artist in the coloring area. You must buy this book, actually the whole series. This is even used as a text book at some colleges that offer comic book coloring classes. I mean it's amazing!

I bought this book from my local store, and being overly impressed with the previous book "Hi-Fi Color for Comics", I believed I got a good deal.

While Brian Miller briefly goes over the rendering and coloring techniques discussed in the previous book, it's still recommended that you read Hi-Fi Color for Comics first, because the theoretical processes like how colors are affected by light are not mentioned in this book.

This book takes what you would have learned in Hi-Fi Color for Comics and teaches you how to apply those processes to other popular styles of art. There's a DVD included with helpful video tutorials and useful brushes.

Be warned that this book absolutely requires you to have a copy of a recent version of Photoshop (CS or higher), I don't believe you will be able to carry out the exercises with Gimp or any cheaper alternative software. The only other downside I found was Brian supplies the lineart of the artwork for the exercises on the DVD, but before you can even start rendering, you have to spend days (or hours, depending on the complexity of the picture) going through a tedious process of lasso selecting areas and filling them with flat colors. It would have been nice if he included a fully flatted working PSD file for each exercise so when we were familiar with the flatting process we could skip to the rendering process (because putting flat colors in is pretty much the same technique all throughout the book).

Overall, I still think you should get this book (and the previous book) if you're stuck on how to color your work in Photoshop, or don't know how to approach it. If you want to learn new techniques for coloring using Photoshop, or to speed up your production, then this is also a good book to have.

The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics
I bought this because the classes i'm taking online are not going into any detail about Photoshop. The only proplem I ran into was this was for a older version of the progream, so the presets don't always work.also some of the tools have changed. I recamend this otther book go with it. I'm more interested in drawing freehand and then inking and coloring in photo shop. You don't need a tablet for this.