Advanced Edits Introduction These are the scenes that really make a comic and often go unnoticed as an edit.

With the techniques described in this tutorial you can let your imagination run wild and take a story to the next level. A few examples of advanced edits are shown below:

Looking at these three scenes you can really see how an advanced edit can add a new dimension to a story. While a nice story can be made without advanced edits, more complex and entertaining stories cannot. Resources ROTR scans from www.royoftheroversgr.com Photoshop, download the official free trial

I first discovered a need for advanced edits when producing my Rovers vs Danefield new story. I really wanted to end the match with a fight in the players bar, but I didnt yet have the skills to make it happen. I think if I could have ended this way it would have made the story much better. Fortunately in the past ten months I have learnt how to produce such scenes and in this tutorial we will work towards producing the big fight between Johnny Dexter and Duncan McKay! So we have the idea, we must produce a brief: 1. 2. 3. 4. Find a scene with a fight Find a suitable Johnny Dexter head that matches the victim in the fight scene Find a Duncan McKay head without a headband that matches the aggressor Find a background that resembles a bar

Ive found two fight scenes: 77-09-24a 81-10-17a

Its really difficult to choose which one is best, I really like the one with Mervyn as the punch lands, but the edit is far easier on Arthur Logans haymaker and achieves much the same for the storyline. To help decide which one is best well have to find that Dexter head. So go to the 1978 Roys England pages and scan through scenes including Dexter. Use a snipping tool to grab all the heads and paste into a Photoshop image, something like this. You should be able to see that no head is suitable for Dexter to take the punch. The only one that really works is the grinning one. Dexter will laugh at McKays attempt to punch him. So we ticked off 1 and 2 from the brief. Now we need to find a Duncan McKay head without a headband. Im going to use the one from 80-05-10a, as there arent many side on ones. Paste the head in and tidy it up. This head is too small though so we need to make if bigger to fit. Remember hold Shift when resizing to keep proportions! You will see that the head is blurry, we can fix this. But do not be tempted to use the Sharpen Filter, it will pixelise the image and look horrible. The best way to remove the blur is to use Image > Adjustments > Selective Colour select Blacks and slide the Blacks bar to the right until the image matches, Ive gone for +30. See the before and after here:

Were not using the background, so use the Eraser to remove the red hair and all the background image (leave Roy and the text bubbles alone):

Paste the grinning Dexter head in and resize, you will see that the skin tone on Dexters face doesnt match Roys. We have to try two ways to make it match, first (usually works) is to adjust the hue, move maybe 5 up or down depending on whether it is too red or too yellow. In this case move 3 to the left. You we notice that the skin is too dark, to fix this we need to add white; use the Selective Colour tool (as above), go to Reds and slide the Blacks bar to the left, this removes saturation from the red colours in the head, in effect adding white. I moved the Blacks to -47, to get this effect: Still the neck doesnt match, so use the Lasso tool to grab a piece of Dexters forehead and paste this to cover the neck area. Move the new neck pieces under the body and use the Eraser to remove the original neck skin. Remove all evidence of Roys head and fix the left shoulder by grabbing a piece of the suit a shaping it to continue the shoulder to the head. The end result means we have ticked off points 1 to 3 of our brief and have only to find a bar for the background. So at this point we have this:

So lets find a bar (80-03-22a) and paste it beneath our punch scene. Make a new group called punch and add all the layers that make up the punch. Now you can play around with the layout of the scene, Ive flipped it horizontally and removed Dexters bubble, so we get this so far:

Obviously that is a very messy scene; we need to remove Sam Barlow first, then review and see whether we need to remove Roy and Blackie. Make the punch group invisible and use the lasso to select and delete Sam. Make the punch group visible again, now we can see what we need to fill in on the bar background: There are two easy bits and one very hard. Easy bit number one is to the right of Dexters head, we need to extend the edge of the cabinet and the yellow wall. Again make the punch group invisible; use the lasso to select the piece of yellow and cabinet, copy and paste it moving downwards until complete. Keep flicking the punch group on and off to check you are not wasting time and effort filling in zones that are covered. Grab a big piece of yellow from between Roy and Sam, paste this over the yellow side. Review in close up and delete any blemishes or pattern errors:

That looks nice to me! Now the second easy area is under Dexters right arm, we can just grab a piece of the bar top with the wood and taps and paste it into this gap. I dont think you need an image for that! Just line up the image properly drawing an imaginary perspective line along the bar. Now onto the hard bit; the area to Dexters right where the bottles are. The first thing to do is fill in a general background, the piece of cabinet above the glasses is best for this. Copy and paste pieces of this until the area has a nice background. Again tidy up any rough edges (see close up below). Now we will fill the gap by the bottles and complete the optic. Use the lasso to grab the missing edge from the brown bottle (we will flip it horizontally) and all of the green bottle and wall. Flip it horizontally and line it up correctly. Complete the red bottles optic by copying a pasting the whole optic from the yellow bottle over the top of it (left). Its really beginning to take shape now. We just need to complete the bottles. First they need a shelf to sit on. So lasso the shelf that the glasses are sat on and position it beneath the bottles. Make sure the distance between the shelves matches the likely height of the bottles. Now we need to join the bottles with the shelf. Do it one bottle at a time; use the lasso to grab the part of the green bottle that is widest only and simply copy it downwards until the bottle shape is complete (dont worry about the label yet, just get the shape correct. Now delete the red labels, doing your best to leave any of the green glass. Lasso the glass between the red and yellow labels and copy and paste this under the edge layers, until the bottle is complete filled. It will look a bit repetitive so now lasso the glass up the neck of the bottle and paste this over the lower area, it will give a glass-like sheen. Repeat for the brown bottle. But copy, paste and flip the label. You should get something like this:

Thats part one of completing the background complete, we need to review our scene and decide what to do with Roy and Blackie:

Im going to remove them both. First we can crop the entire scene, delete everything just to the right of Duncans hand. Then use the lasso to select Roy and Blackie and delete them too. Use big slabs of yellow wall to fill in all the vacant areas. Then we can decide how to complete the scene. Firstly we can complete the ceiling just grab the section with the straight black line and paste this right until the edge of the page. Then take a big piece of ceiling and paste this over to completely fill the white area. Then complete the diagonal line dividing the yellow and the ceiling and the black line that shows the corner of the room. You should now have this to work with:

One big decision now; where does the bar end? Im going to add a little section to the right of Dexters left hand and stop the bar there, with the edge running down to his thumb, this means there is less work to do as his hand block a large part! Fill the desired area with the bar wood, then use the Brush set to black and size 1 to draw an edge (use the brush because it automatically disperses, the pen draws pixels only and looks wrong). I now have this and am happy with it: You could finish now and have a lovely advanced scene to work with. But to really complete it we need to add pictures to the walls. You can copy, paste parts of the frame to complete the picture that was above Roys head. Then copy and paste the picture from the wall in the scene preceding the bar scene we used. This part should be easy by now, so no step by step instructions here. Once you are happy remove the text and write in your words and create a neat black border; heres my finished scene:

How to use these techniques Many of the skills youve just learnt can be applied to other scenes. Changing backgrounds is particularly useful, especially when you really want to use a scene but the stadium is wrong. I came across this problem when producing my 1977 Charity Shield match at Wembley Stadium. The old Wembley was a unique stadium, so it was important that my story took place in a recognisable Wembley. Luckily we have a great match a Wembley in 1978, England v Holland to use as an example. Mel Park scenes can easily be converted into Wembley using the techniques above. Step one - make sure that the concrete wall separating the upper and lower tiers is complete; just copy and paste to fill the gap like you did with the walls and ceiling. Step two make sure that the upper tier crowd is full; just grab a section of crowd and paste it like you did with the yellow walls above. Delete different sections of each layer to create a clean look. Step three add poles; copy and paste a pole from the 1978 Wembley stadium at intervals along the top of the concrete wall.

Step four select the entire upper tier crowd and reduce brightness until desired contrast is achieved. Step five check your Wembley and make sure that the back rows of the upper tier are in black shadow. Heres a few examples: 78-04-03b My 1977 Charity Shield

Just really simple edits that add (in my opinion) so much to the story. PRIZE GIVEAWAY Anyone you can convert the scene where Mervyn punches Roy into a follow-up scene, where Dexter knocks down McKay can have all my Roy of the Rovers cards and stickers!

Thanks for reading!

Storky Knight, 16th December 2013