Workshop on making photo POD books

While making my way around some galleries over the weekend, I was showing my new Blurb books as works in progress. And although I would have perferred a request to hang my work, I did get a serious inquiry as to teaching a one day workshop on how to create a photographic Print on Demand (POD) book. hmmmm.

I just may do that, so stay tuned, I have a feeling that there will be more about this later. If it occurs, it will be here in Southern California. But that does open the door for other opportunities, eh?

Best regards, Doug

Despecklation

An interesting thing happened to me while I was working my way through the image sharpening for Blurb, I learned more about noise reduction. huh?

Okay, I have to admit, up to now, I just accepted noise in my digital images. I could easily see the noise in the skyes of my toned images for In Passing. And I did not realize the amount of noise in my scanned images, but since my workflow until recently was now fully digital, I did not worry about the scanned film. Ah, ignorance is bliss;- )

So now while I was trying to get the best book printed image and working through the issues of sharpening, I have realized the issues with noise and of course the need for noise reduction. And for most of you, I image you wonder what planet I have been on for the last couple of years, eh?

So I have been talking and working on some noise reduction routines to see if it makes a difference. And as you might guess, it does for some images a lot more than others. And it seeems to make more of a difference for my digital images from my XTi (10.2Mp) than it does from my scanned 120 film images.

So I do expect to try out Noise Nija shortly, but I have found that creating a duplicate layer in Photoshop and then going to the channel mixer, running a despeckle filter on each color channel to help a lot, sometimes running it twice on the blue channel, which is usually recognized as the “noisey” channel.

I don’t think that this is significant to the sharpening book, but I do see that I want to review most of my In Passing photographs and implement some noise reduction on them. Ah, always something to improve my work…

Best regards, Doug

Oh, and with a noise reduction on an phototgraph, I realize that it will probably require a little more sharpening action on the baseline file, as most noise reduction processes also soften the image. Which is why I am extremly happy that my sharpening action is on a seperate adjustment layer that can be easily pitched and replaced with a new adjustment layer;- )

Evaluating my sharpening how-to book – part II

I have continued to look and then look again at the various test images in my book Sharpening Photogoraphs for Blub Prining for many times. And  I have come to conculsion that I had not selected the best Unsharp Mask setting to get the best results with Blurb printing with the HP Indigo 5000 halftone printer.

But I do take some solace that I had come very close.

I had read the stuff from the late Bruce Fraser a number of times when he had stated that you can not trust you monitor to get it right for half tone printing. To get good half tone printing, what you see on your monitor may be ugly. I had used his 25% size rule of thumb, that is reduce the image to 25% of size to evaluate your sharpening action. And I think that I forgot to put this in my book, so it will appear that there is going to be another editon or version (e.g.V1.1) to capture my current assessments.

But he was right again. I had used the two step sharpening sequence with the second sharpening action at 100% 150% Amount and it now appears that a 200% 250% Amount with the same Radius and Threshold would have worked better for the halftone printing. Looking backat my 200%  250% sample JPEGs images on my monitor, I can see that there are some artifacts starting to appear. That just could not be right, but now looking at the printed page, what happen to those ugly artifacts??

This was true of both my film and digital camera example. And the digital images now appear that they could take even more sharpening than the film image. I guess I am not done evaluating these images yet.  Nevertheless, this confirms that output sharpening is needed for half tone printing. And kicking it up from the 100% 150% to 200%, 250% although not pretty on the monitor, create sharper printed images on the book page.

So I think I am getting very close, even if I did not initially chose the best sharpening setting, the book does illustrate what the better settings could be, which is the whole reason that I knocked this out so quickly in the first place. nice.

Oh, and what I did chose, althought maybe not the best, did make a substantial visual improvement!

Best regards, Doug

Yikes, TYPO alert: I should stated 100% not 150% and 200% not 250%.

6/20/08 I completed an update (V1.1) to this book and the increase sharpening actions that I discussed above were not supported with the new book that I received.