ku # 545/46 ~ attitude adjustment
Friday, January 9, 2009 at 10:31AM 
West Branch of the Au Sable River • click to embiggenYesterday's entry received 2 of the "standard" response types that I have heard / read almost every time the idea of POD photo books arises - 1) that of "quality" (which usually considered to be quite questionable) and 2) the relatively confusing / non-intuitive nature of POD service provider's book making software.
Let me address issue #1 with a bit of a story from my experience, starting with this from Jörg Colberg @ Conscientious:
I have been thinking about landscape photography a lot lately. The problem with that type of photography is that there appears to be a sweet spot that is sandwiched between extremely decorative - some would probably prefer the word "kitschy" - work (everything you see in "National Geographic") and extremely boring work (think Ansel Adams). Both extremes typically spend too much time on technical details since they both resulted from a history in which the "combination of sharp focus, tonal richness, and clarity of detail [...] came more and more to be the subject of the photograph [...] rather than a tool for artistic expression." (Janet Malcolm, from "East and West", an article I found in her 1980 collection of articles "Diane & Nikon")
My first job as an assistant in a commercial photo studio was obtained because of my color printing skills and experience. The studio's most important client was Superba Cravats - at that time, the oldest and one of the largest manufacturers of neckwear in the United States. The account was a money-making machine - the company had several lines of neckwear (including the Johnny Carson Division) and every one of those lines needed advertising photographs for every season's new products. As long as the earth continued to spin and revolve around the sun, new neckwear spun out of Superba Cravats like calender clockwork.
Looking back on my experience with that account, it is very obvious that it was one of the most influential learning experiences I ever had in understanding both color picture making / printing and the reproduction (on a printing press) thereof.
As soon as a shooting session commenced - they could last up to 2 weeks - I was banished to the darkroom where I processed the 5×7 inch color negative films and began grinding out 16×20 inch color "C" prints under the demanding and watchful eye of the account creative director. To say he was "particular" about color is an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Over and over again, I would have to make prints with minutely incremental color changes in order to demonstrate / prove to him that the color of a given necktie(s) could not be reproduced given the constraints / limitations of the color negative / C print process.
Those constraints / limitations were, of course, one of the very reasons we were going the negative / print route - once we arrived a satisfactory print, it was off to the retoucher for corrections and further adjustments. With airbrush and dyes, a retoucher could obtain a closer color match on some of the more difficult to match photographically (if not impossible) product colors.
Once that was finished, the prints were off to the mechanical artist for final ad prep and from there to the pre-press bureau for the separations needed (insert here all of the constraints / limitations of the conversion to CMYK color space) for submission to the various publications in which the ads were running. Where, once they were on press, a whole other set of printing-press, ink-on-paper set of limitations were introduced.
What you ended up with on the printed page was an approximation of the original photograph, closer in some colors than others and, with some colors, really not very close at all. And, if you went to the aggravating extreme of laying a necktie from the picture next to/on the printed page, well, at that point, if didn't put a gun to your head, you'd have to wonder what the point, not to mention all the expense, of all the print fine-tuning and retouching actually was.
What I learned from this experience, aside form all the really valuable technical stuff about color photography / print reproduction (most of which I put to use every time I work in Photoshop), was that the client seemed to have missed the point of what we were doing. For all of his preoccupation with color, he seemed to miss the fact that nobody was walking into a haberdashery, printed page in hand, and trying find a tie that look exactly like the one in the ad. If that were the case, they would have never sold a single piece of neckwear.
So, here's the point relative to POD books - if you are expecting the printed page to look exactly like your pictures, get over it. Even allowing for medium to medium conversion differences, if you are expecting the printed page to be mistaken for a photographic print, get over it. If you are expecting it to look anything like what you see on your carefully calibrated monitor, get over it.
It's just not going to happen. It's not only not going to happen with POD book printing, it's not going to happen on an 8-color high-end non-digital press. That's because it's a reproduction of a printed picture. You need to think of it in the same way you do about the difference between the real world and the reproduction of it you get when you make a picture of it - neither reproduction is the same as the "real" thing. Similar, yes - exact, no.
On that note, let me also point out that I, as a viewer of a photo book (of any kind of printing), have absolutely no idea of what the picture makers original prints look like. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Therefore, I am not comparing anything. I am looking at pictures, which, unless there is some obvious and visually obtrusive reproduction problems, I just look at them at face value.
There's also another way to think about it. A bit extreme perhaps, but instructive and valuable nevertheless. Again, from Jörg Colberg:
...you could show me a Diane Arbus photo reprinted in a newspaper and it would still be a fantastic photo. Maybe that would be a good criterion for What makes a great photo: If the photo still looks great if you print it in a newspaper it's a great photo.
So, IMO, you "quality" whiners just have to get over it. My experience with several POD photo book printers (Shutterfly in particular) is that, once you learn the in and outs of their particular system, they all (with blurb being the one exception that I know about) deliver pretty high level of what is known in the printing industry as commercially acceptable reproduction. In fact, the level of reproduction they deliver from an POD digital press is actually quite better than that generally obtainable from a standard press only a few years ago.
Therefore, if "quality" is your excuse, let me amend yesterday's proclamation to read:
"Bullshit! Get over it. Just suck it up and get it done."
And, to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk, I will design and print, at my expense, a standard 8×8 or 8.5×11 POD photo book of the work of one lucky Landscapist contestant who can convince me (money is NOT accepted) why I should do their book over all others.
Just click on the "Email Me" link in the right column and start seducing me.
Reader Comments (10)
Thanks for the excellent summary.
I think I was one of the commenters about quality - but I was not whining, I was just asking, as I haven't done any book-type things recently. (I wrote/edited/published some books years ago, but they were textbooks and similar stuff, and color, if there was any, was an afterthought.)
I'm doing some experiments in this area, to get some experience of the effort involved. I'm planning to order a photobook of family photos straight from iPhoto, and I'll also try out Blurb to see whether it offers some advantages.
Long ago, when I worked in a camera store, one of the most "fun" tasks was having to listen to photofinishing customers complain, "But that's not the colour I saw!", and try to explain this evidently astonishing outcome to them.
As for POD books, Doug Plummer's experience with Blurb is worth looking at: http://tinyurl.com/77wgpp
Well - I went and made a photo book with Blurb (using photos from summer and autumn as the content), and ordered a copy to see how it looks and handles.
Quite easy indeed, when you don't think too much about it, just do the work.
does this mean you feel blurb doesn't deliver a high level of reproduction, or am I reading this incorrectly?
I've been reasonably happy with what I've got from blurb. Not always thrilled, but happy. Had reasonable experiences with shutterfly, too (books and calendars)
You are right, they aren't photographic prints, but they look good in the hand, without a brand new tie to compare it to.
Like JH above, I was one of the commenters mentioning quality. But I certainly wasn't complaining, as I really don't have any experience with POD books. My gripe with quality is not that the images don't come out with the perfect color but rather that the images don't appear "commercially acceptable". If I let the printer tweak the images, they always are ok, but my work straight out of Photoshop never looks as good. I know the problem is with my computer's operator. Does anyone have any tips on preparing one's photos for printing? The above link to Doug Plummer seems like a good start.
Somewhere along the line here you've mentioned a couple of times "once you learn the in and outs of their particular system" with Shutterfly. What are these in and outs? I'm particularly interested in designing in InDesign. Would I have to out put the files to jpegs or something? Whine number nine: My triptychs would be so small, what a waste. I would like to cross the gutter. How much is lost in the gutter? Whine number ten: the classic 8.5x11 (which looks to really be 11x8.5 {whine number eleven}) doesn't have a printed cover.
Has anyone tried making a magazine at MagCloud? You can upload a PDF! It's not a book, but neither is NG and their repro quality is pretty good. I suppose thinking it might be NG quality is a pipe dream.
I've been fiddling a little bit in Shutterfly Mark and am also wondering about those "ins and outs" you mention. The design template doesn't seem to accept images that I have created a type layer on. I am trying to have some control where I place the title on the cover rather than their standard canned layouts. And the full bleed photo cover seems to crop off quite a bit of the image when I place it. Is there a trick to this? It bugs me. Do you have to join that "pro gallery" service for more design options and control? Lotsa questions I know, but you offered. ;-)
Hey Mark,
Forget those questions above, for now anyway. I'm digging a little deeper and figuring some things out.
To JH:
I've used the iPhoto service several times for Christmas gift books and they look great for that kind of thing. The linen covers are just ok, but the printed pages look good to me. They have slightly cropped a couple of pics in some of my books, but not enough that anyone by myself would notice. It is extremely easy to make the books in iPhoto. Be sure you have a good internet connection. I have satellite, but some days, uploading can be slower (cloudy, rainy, etc.).