How to Convert Comic Books to Digital Format

Living in a world that is becoming more and more digital every day, archiving documents and files to our computers has become an important part of our lives. People archive music, movies, TV shows, ebooks and more. But for archiving to really work, there has to be a standard; formats that everyone can agree upon so that the items can be easily shared and accessed freely anywhere, at any time. Finally such a standard has come for the comic book in the form of cbr and cbz files.



Cbr and cbz files are archives of sequential images that can be loaded into freely available viewers for reading on a computer or shared with others on the Internet. This widely accepted format is perfect for the comic book and has made it possible to finally have your entire comic book collection archived on your own computer. This tutorial will teach you how to take a physical comic book, get it into your computer and save it as a cbr or cbz.

Things You'll Need

• A scanner
• A photo editing program
• An archiving program such as WINRAR or WINZIP
• A cbr/cbz viewer
• A computer (instructions are for Mac or PC)

Instructions

1. 

   Scan the comic book into your computer using your scanner. Each page must be scanned one at a time, making this the most tedious part of the process. Suggested settings would be to use a DPI of at least 100 to 150. Any less than that and the comic may be difficult to read. Save the images as a TIF, PNG or PSD (whatever your editor can handle). The idea is to keep the quality of the image higher for editing and then it will finally be saved into JPGs when we are finished.

2. 

   Load the images into a photo editor such as Photoshop, Fireworks or Gimp. At this stage you want to crop out any bad edges, adjust the color or contrast and fix any other issues that happened during scanning. When you are done editing, export each page as a JPG. Try to go for a better quality JPG by not compressing too much.

3. 

   Name the files in sequential order. You have to be careful, because if you make a mistake the viewer will read the pages out of order. The name for each JPG must be alphanumeric and the idea is to keep the name of each image the same, but just change the page number. For example: AmazingTalesVol1-1.jpg, AmazingTalesVol1-2.jpg, AmazingTalesVol1-3.jpg.
   
   * Try to avoid using doubles digits for numbers less than 10 because this may throw off the viewer (e.g. 00, 01, 02).

4. 

   Archive the images into either a zip or rar file. You can do this with any archiving program, but if you have Windows, WINRAR is your best bet. It's free, handles both formats and is easy to use. Just select all the JPG images for your comic book, right-click and choose "Add To Archive." Whether you choose zip or rar is only a matter of preference. Be sure to name the archive file something significant so you know exactly what it is such as "AmazingTalesVol1" or "StrangeWorlds_Vol1_Number2."

5. 

   To convert the rar or zip to cbr or cbz is the easiest part of all. If it's a rar, change the file extension to "cbr." If it's a zip, change it to "cbz." For example: StrangeWorld_Vol1_Number2.zip would now be StrangeWorld_Vol1_Number2.cbz

6. 

   Finally, all you need is a viewer to read the comic. A popular viewer is CDisplay, but it only works on Windows. Mac users can use Comical or FFView (see Resources below for download links). You might also want to check out my eHow article that explains how to upload comics to your iPhone using ComicZeal. Happy reading!

Tips & Warnings

• To archive files on an Apple Macintosh computer, select all the files, right-click and select "Compress X Items" on OSX Leopard or "Create Archive of X Items" on versions prior to Leopard (version 10.4x or lower).

Resources

• Comical for Mac
• CDisplay for Windows
• FFView for Mac