How I color a dndorks.com comic
New Dndorks comic today! http://dndorks.com/comics/6_10_2009.aspx
Arthur Saves the Day Part 2.
And I thought I'd write down my coloring process, in case its useful to someone.
The instructions assume a competency with photoshop, I'd be happy to explain any particular feature though.
First, in a panel comic like dndorks, I select a marquee around each frame, which is each on its own layer, and click the mask button. This makes it so I don't need to worry about coloring inside the lines of the square since I can only color inside the masked area.
Then I create a layer below the background layer and I fill that in with whatever the base color is going to be, blue for outside, gray for dungeons, whatever.
Above the backbround art layer but below the character art layer, I create a layer for the character color, a layer for character shading, and a layer for character highlighting.
The order is important, the Character color layer needs to be below the character shading layer, which should probably be beneath the charcter highlighting area.
I set the shading layer as Darker Color and opacity 30%, then I set the highlighting layer as Lighter Color and opacity 30%. Feel free to play with the % whether you want more extreme shading or highlighting.
Then I simply color on the character color layer. The easiest thing to do for anything with solid lines is using the pencil tool to paint around the ouside of an object then use the paintbucket to fill it. This way, the paintbucket fills it perfectly. If there aren't lines, like I'm coloring my own patterns, I use the brush tool because it allows smooth curves and such, but then when you fill it will create an antialiased line most likely, which you'll need to color over. You shouldn't need to worry about being perfect because the lineart should be above safe and sound and your layer might look messy but the lines should cover it.
Once the color layer is done, now everything else is extra. Change to solid black, click on the Character shading layer, and start adding shading with the brush tool. Because the layer is set to Darker Color and 30%, it will automatically shade to just a darker color than what you're coloring over, it won't be black (well unless black is the darker color).
Likewise, you can highlight by using 100% white on the Lighter Color layer, and once again, it won't actually be white, it'll be 30% lighter than the color on the character color layer.
I'm honestly not that good at choosing "where" to shade or highlight, but essentially you try and think in your head where the light would be coming from and then shade on the opposite side of the light source. You have to think of things that are 2D as 3D so even if some things are towards the light source, due to how the curve works, they may actually be shaded to represent that its curved away from the light source.
Anyways, I find my method to be very efficient and easy, so I thought I'd share.