Now that all the artwork is done, I need to put in the words. When I layout the artwork I write in the text. This gives me an understanding of how to fit the words into the balloons later. For example, if I were to have dialogue that says "You can't fight him... he's too powerful, wouldn't you agree?" I would write it in WordPerfect like this:

You can't fight
him... He's too
powerful, wouldn't
you agree?

All of those words now fit the shape I drew the word balloon in earlier. And of course I can always adjust the words later in Photoshop to make them truly fit in the balloons properly.

Finally, once all of the words are put in, the artwork is finished, and everything is looking great... I flatten it. I do not save comic pages as PSD's because if I did that I would run VERY quickly out of room on my hard drive, and also because it's not necessary right now for me to have to have one.

Once it's all flat and there are no more layers and everything is all in one piece of artwork, I save it as a color BMP. I save as a BMP because it is a lossless compression. If I saved it as a JPEG, some information would be lost and the quality would not be as good. BMP's are awesome, because they don't loose quality, and yet they WinZip nicely. I can compress over 100mb of BMP's into a nice small 5mb ZIP file.

After it's saved as a BMP, I reduce it to a grayscale image and save it as a TIFF. The TIFF file is what you will actually see in print and is the file I will eventually send off to my publishers.

Then, for myself, I reduce that image into a very small JPEG file (roughly about 500x700). I do this because I need a file that's small enough that I can quickly browse through my finished story to check the flow, and also to see what the artwork is going to look like in print. I held up a copy of my book to my monitor and measured how big it was. 500x700ish pixels is roughly the exact size of the book to my monitor so what I see on the screen is actually 100% accurate to the size it will eventually be printed. It's just a check for myself to be able to see how things are working out and to see the final book before it's made.