Hey everybody, it's been a while but I wanted to show you some neat technical stuff that's been going on behind the scenes!
As we've been working on books, we've continuously learned new techniques and always have a new hurdle to cross over. Probably the most technical we've learned is handling the Japanese jackets for the books and making them appear in English just as they appear in the original Japanese format.
When we give the printer our jacket, we actually hand them two different files. The first one being the CYMK version of the jacket. But we also give them a PMS (Pantone Matching System) copy as well. They overlay these during the printing process to enhance the colors and make for a bolder appearance. In order to get the same image you see when holding the Japanese printed version, you must combine these two images together in the printing process - it's pretty neat, but can be so tedious!
We give the printer the PMS file and give them a specific Pantone color and they change all the tones of black and change it to the same tone of the color we request. In all cases so far we've had a pink Pantone color given to them.
Essentially any gray will be changed to that color (black being 100% that Pantone color) and areas where it is white are unaffected.
Porno Switch is probably one of the more drastic differences in appearance before and after the layer is applied. So we thought about the fact that yes this is a printed process, but it's really not fair to our digital readers who aren't enjoying the physical copies glory. So we decided that it may be a good idea to figure out how to digitally display the images the same way they would appear if printed and overlayed together.
So we created our third file using the Pantone color with a mix of Photoshop and Illustrator and combining the two layers (with magic) for the more enhanced appearance.
For reference:
And we were successful! It may not seem like that big of a deal, but we really did learn through trial and error with Punikano. If anything is even the slightest off you get a terrible blur, all elements on the page are moveable (Title, author, pretty little effects on the page, background patterns, etc) and if they're not all perfectly aligned it fails ):
There also comes where if you make even the tiniest change to the cover (like we found a spelling error after completing the jacket, twice lol... orz) you have to redo the CYMK version, redo the PMS version, and redo the PMS version where we've manually added the Pantone to it). That's a lot of repetitive work that each time can create a user error by mistake. Not to mention you then have to re-export everything to PNG which takes quite a while at a high DPI rate.
I think you'd agree with us though that the extra effort is worth it :)