Right now, this seems like crazy making. I now know that my process of creating images for a Blurb monogram book will result in soft resolution photographs in the book based on my press proof of In Passing. So why am I continuing to work like a madman on a second book that will end up looking like the first? I am spinning my wheels, my friends.
So, I have the concept, basic photographs, introduciton and book layout for my book, Places Amongst Us. But I need to figure out the photogaphic sharpening process for the Blurb books, otherwise it is again, Crap in, Crap out. And I just don’t have the time to knowingly look ahead to doing it right the second time.
Thus, I am now hukering down to work on the photo sharpening process for the Blurb books. I found today that with the Blurb book software, Booksmart, you can get somewhat of a soft proof of the results. The softness of my 300dpi JPEG image in the book was very close to the softproof. What I did determine today is that Booksmart does allow some magnification of the image in the softproof mode, but you can not drill down too far, about half the slidder they provide. It would be really nice if you could get to 100%.
Yes, I did not do a drill down with the softproof the first time, as I had figured that the conversion from the Photoshop file to a JPEG file was tansparent to the file. Nope. And I had used the Bicubic Shaprner while making the change. Not enough to keep the original sharpness.
And I now recall a statement that Brooks Jensen made while he was preparing my images for LensWork, that he wanted to know how much sharpening my images had so the he did not oversharpen. So he was doing somehting to the digital files in the way of sharpening them for the subseqent offset printing. Ah, the black art of printing.
So now I have to figure out what that formula is for Blurb book printing. I guess the engineer is coming out of me again. I can not settle for ‘good enuf’ for what I intend to represent my work.
I’ll keep you all posted on my results;- )
Best regards, Doug
