#tbedits

quick note just to say: i’m focusing on a figure more than a scene in this, but the same principles apply. everything i say about sizing up/down, selecting panels, and avoiding weird ratios is just as true with a panel that has a background as it is for a silhouette, or anything you work with. it’s all just pixels!

the main tip i have is that you want to start with high quality scans of a page -- like, not a screenshot, but by right clicking and opening the image in a new tab and saving it, or by just right click-saving it when possible. that'll give you the best resolution in terms of digital scans that already exist. you want the clearest image possible to work with.

the second thing is to check the images you want to use to make sure they're at least of a similar level of detail when you select your panels. take these three kori panels, just as an example:

they're all very different sizes and levels of detail. one is a small panel in a bigger spread, one is a full-page splash panel, and the other is a brief little group shot. you can't bring the first one up to the same size as the second one, and you definitely can't bring the third one up to the same size as either of the first two. doing so would make either of them pixelated and distorted, or at the very least blur the edges. it just wouldn't look... right.

so the third one would be an automatic no for me, generally, unless for some reason i need a really tiny and cute kory emoji. (who doesn't?)

but! you can take that middle one down to the size of the first one, and it'll look pretty close. because they're both detailed, where the third one is meant to be more of a far-off view with less detailing. just tilt that middle image and crop it to be about the same as the first, then remove all the extra details and fill in the blank spots.

you end up with these:

you can see that one is fuzzier and less defined, because of the sizing differences and original quality of the panels, but like... they aren't so different that it's jarring. to get a better idea, let's look at sizing.

the first image, from the smaller panel, is currently 262 pixels wide and 368 pixels tall, and the larger is 427x632. that's a pretty big discrepancy. the key here is that you never want to make the smaller one... bigger. that'll make all the blurring worse, and ruin any definition that the image has. instead, you want to downsize the larger image to match. that way, it isn't getting pixelated -- it just translates better, generally.

you can do this by "transforming" the image and scaling it down to the same height as the other image, because they don't have identical ratios. they'll still be off in terms of width, but that's not something we'll worry about here. make sure to either "constrain proportions" or "preserve ratio," anything along those lines. that'll make sure you aren't making it too wide or too tall and skewing the thing to look like a funhouse mirror, if that makes sense. in photoshop, it's that little like... chainlink? between the width and height measurements.

here's the kory image at its new size:

again, still clear, still defined. just a little smaller now. at this point, i'd use some filters to make it better match the original image. we'll lose some clarity -- and some quality -- but it'll make it look better next to the first one in the final edit. if you fiddle with the "palette knife" filter in photoshop, you can get it closer to that old vintage fuzz sometimes. here's what we got:

so now you can take that, and you can use it to make any kind of edit you want alongside the first image -- so long as your final edit is not any bigger than either of those panels. again, sizing up will make it worse.

here you are: