Well, if you pay them enough, I think Adobe has a tutorial.
I despise that company, sorry. :/
You'll want to mostly practice. There are doubtless tutorials, just google for the product and "tutorial"... I'd trust a tutorial made by someone who uses the product regularly, more than the product's built in one. Go to youtube as well, there might be something easier to use there, than just an html page.
Everyone does things differently, and most comic artists I know use at least 3 different products regularly (depending on their needs) to scan, color and produce their works. So... having one is going to get you a certain level of ability, but sometimes you'll have to send the image to another format or program to fiddle with it more. Elements probably has most of what many colorists use and need, though.
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I just wrote 2 tutes for this, here check em out:Tute 1 and Tute 2
However I have an entire gallery of Art Tutorials in my DA account, check these out from my
Favorites folder...
Good luck!
LJ
Yeah, DeviantArt is a wealth of information when it comes to tutorials, whether it be shading techniques and highlighting or yaoi pointers and how to airbrush bite marks from your models' bodyparts....
TL
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how to airbrush bite marks from your models' bodyparts....
TL
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TMI! TMI!
Actually it brings up an interesting aside: Some artists shouldn't try and be photographers. We had a book of Boris's photography sold at my store, and while it was ... nice... it was pretty clear that he only used reference photos and hadn't really gotten his act together as a professional photographer.
How do I know this?
His models all had their bra-lines still dug into their skin, when he photographed them. Any pro would have made sure they were 'natural' by the time the shoot happened, or - far more likely these days - edit the skin to be smooth instead of furrowed.
It's been something that bothered me for years. Just wanted to get that off my chest, so to speak...
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Thanks a lot for the tutorials...I see I'll need a lot of practice!! How would you handle a comic book page?
Really depends on what you have for art...
Professionally, I've seen plenty of good and plenty of bad physical pages. I've seen pencil lines so tight that inkers actually refuse to ink them - for fear of screwing the lines up.
Over the years, (and yes, I worked a comic shop here in san diego, the center of the Wildstorm universe) I watched as comics went from all hand-colored using dyes and brushes, to computer separations - yes, people used to do the color separations *by hand* not by using a computer to do the work.... I've seen art that used to be placed on a platten photographically - the blacks, and colors done separately... They're not done that way any more.
I have also unfortunately seen the end of an inking era. Plenty of comics still do have inkers who work over the pencils, and then they scan those and send them to the colorists and letterers. But a LOT of comics have gone the way of "the pencils are good enough! color it from there!"
Most pencillers *cannot* get a good, solid line down. Thus, the colorists have to work with sloppy, vague linework, and guess at where details should go.
The colorists are usually the last people to get the product, and they're almost always blamed for books being late - even though it's more often the penciller themselves....
If *I* were to be coloring my own work? I have a scanner that's 11x17 which is GREAT, perfect for comic art pages. Hard to find in stores, but well worth cruising around ebay to get one, they're not that expensive from ebay (I got mine for 140 bucks, which is a third the price of some in stores!). I scan the full page, at around 300 or even 400 dpi - this is at least twice what the print dpi is. (Some comics are 150, some only 75 dpi, but that may have changed more recently.)
Myself, I love coloring WITHIN THE LINES thankyou very much, so I try pretty hard to have solid, easily selected areas. I *hate* using layers, myself, but I know people who do professional comics use a lot, lot lot of layers when they're coloring...
If you don't have a tablet, you should probably look into one. Coloring with a mouse is great for pixel art and simple web graphics like I make for my dragon-collecting group, but *not* for professionally-styled books or artwork...
Most folks do "flats" which outline the basic large areas of color in their basic tones, then do some shading, and finally detail work. It takes a long time to do some pieces, purely because of the detail that you'd WANT out of it - but likewise I've also seen details lost in the printing process, so generally keep details simple or clear.
Also.... paper - different color pallettes work on different paper stock. A bright, white glossy paper looks *entirely* different from typical newsprint matte stock, but both are still used in the comic business. I've seen really great comics RUINED by having been printed on the wrong stock.
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You need to write a book Zeik, I'd buy it!!! 
Pssh. 
I've been writing books since i was 10, and haven't finished a one. But I'll hold you to it if I get anything published lol!!
Actually the things I'd highly recommend anyone looking at the technology should read, are the Art of Inking (published by Dark Horse) and both volumes of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. While I don't necessarily agree with everything he has to say, the 2nd book has a LOT of information from the "insiders" view about the history of how comics are actually made, rather than their contents which the 1st volume concentrates on. I found it fascinating, however I already knew most of the things he had to say - it was just neat to see it all in one place.
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Hello. Lurker here.
I haven't actually posted a new, finished anything in about a year and a half. (Likely one reason for my lurkitude.) I'm definitely on the side of rusty right now and am, in some ways, trying to re-learn a bunch of this on my own. Nevertheless, I thought I'd chime in.
On shading, like others have said, tutorials tutorials tutorials. Read a bunch. Try a bunch of techniques. This is one thing that will take a lot of time and practice to get down. I used to do most of mine just by hand with Photoshop's airbrush tools. Now, I've gotten a bit lazy and cheat a bit using gaussian blurs to help the process along. Glowy things can be easier. Most graphics programs have some filters that can achieve the effect for you. Just be careful with filters - it's very easy to overdo it.
And since there's been so much talk about inking and such, I've recently come to learn for myself that getting those nice, smooth lines can be a LOT easier in a vector program like Adobe Illustrator as opposed to working in a pixel-based program like Photoshop. Of course, the coloring/shading/detail work still needs to be done in Photoshop.
Most of my newer work (that is... when I finish it) is a combination of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Corel's Painter - all with a Wacom Tablet. (And don't think you need the fanciest, most expensive tablet. I worked on their bottom-of-the-line tablet for years and it did the job I needed it to just fine. You can get a perfectly good tablet for under $100 these days.)
I always ink my stuff. I just don't make clean lines without ink, and I love inking.
I don't have a tablet, yet, and won't be able to get one until I get my new computer (6 months or so). So pretty much now I'm working with a mouse. I usually work on 14x17 Bristol board (smooth). I take my stuff to Kinkos and have it scanned to a disk, because my scanner is too small. Yeah, it's really inconvinient but, it's the best I can do. Maybe I'll start working on 11x17.
That's pretty much how I've always done things. I don't know if I'm using the right paper etc. I've just ordered some non-reproduction blue pencils to use.
Anyhow, I wanted to learn to color on the computer because I've seen mediocre at best art get turned amazing with good coloring. I've also had one of my drawings a couple of years back colored by another person using Photoshop and it blew me away.
Like I said earlier, check out ebay for a reasonably good 11x17 scanner. While mine integrates with my PSP interface a little oddly, as it comes with its own system for activating and scanning, it *does* work very nicely, and it's big. And, for under 200 bucks.
Now if only I could ditch this crapola HP printer I've got, and get a 2nd one like I bought for my office... I didn't think I'd *need* a photo-scanner-printer-fax thing. BUt it was like 90 bucks, and even though it's not bigger than 11x8.5 it's still really nice.
Technology!
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I'm stuck in the dark ages when t comes to my art. I've been drawing for a long time and I've been coloring my art on my own with professsional art markers.
I've come to a point to where I would like to start using my computer to color my drawings now. I have Adobe Photoshop Elements that seems to be working alright (what do I know?) but I really have no idea what I'm doing.
I guess my questions are, I'm trying to figure out how to shade/hi light and make objects glow. Can anyone give me a dumbed down version of how to do this. And/or give me some web sites that will help explain and give me more help and tips?