[Brad Smith Participant Posts: 31]

New Article Announcements & Discussions

on: June 1, 2024 at 4:19 pm

The article by John Custodio is perhaps the best write up I’ve seen on this topic, particularly the B&W printing challenge.  Very well done John.  Excellent concept and design. And explained very well.

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: Article on Designing and Publishing Photo Book

Reply #1 on: June 1, 2024 at 4:38 pm

I agree. Good write-up and fine photographs.

[Erik Brammer Participant Posts: 289]

Re: Article on Designing and Publishing Photo Book

Reply #2 on: July 2, 2024 at 9:32 am

John’s article is indeed very informative and educational, and it’s fantastic to see confirmation that what I have done with Blurb for my photobooks in the past in fact wasn’t all wrong. 🙂

I am working for HP, and for our industrial printing business in particular, HP Indigo being one of the technologies we provide for high quality production printing. From 2016 to 2020 I was looking after the photo segment in the EMEA market.

I can only confirm what John is saying: The well known photo finishers that produce very high volumes typically only print CMYK which can lead to the stated color casts that can only be minimized keeping your presses well calibrated and performing regular color adjusts.

A special BW printing mode that we have introduced in the stated time frame is what we call KKllk, printing two separations of black two different screening angles and gradation curves plus light light black, basically a photo grey, for the lighter tones. This works on the basis of DeviceLink profiles from sRGB or AdobeRGB into the Indigo output color space. Unfortuately, none of the big players like Shutterfly, District Photo, Blurb etc. offer this KKllk printing mode. So I am glad to hear that John found conveyor.studio that offer this printing mode or something comparable. These print service providers may operate at higher cost, typically translating into somewhat higher prices, but the improvement in quality can be substantial, and they may also offer a wider choice of papers.

Fantastic project resulting in a fantastic book, John, chapeau!

Erik

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