Publishing on Blurb - Part 1

In an earlier post I mentioned that I'm editing a book of KAP images to be published by Blurb. I'm excited about doing this project, though the learning curve has been a little steep. This is my first book, and my first experience editing other people's pictures. It's an ongoing story, but it starts here:

The first time I heard of Blurb was during Worldwide KAP Weekend 2008, when Peter Neville offered to take a collection of images from each of the photographers involved in WWKW and publish their photography as a book. Peter used Blurb, a company that does print-on-demand for books. The result was a very professional book that is fun to look at, regardless of the fact that I have two pages of images in it. So when Worldwide KAP Weekend was extended to Worldwide KAP Week in 2009, and when no one else stepped forward to edit the book, I did.

I had already been planning to publish a book of aerial pictures of Hawai`i, but at this time I really don't have enough pictures to justify putting a book together. My goal is to have at least five hundred print-ready pictures to cull through. I figured if it doesn't hurt when I cut out 2/3 of the pictures, I didn't bring enough good work to the table in the first place. So editing the book for WWKW 2009 makes for a good dry-run on my own book, and gives me the opportunity to work with other photographers.

In reading through the forums on Blurb, what became apparent very quickly is that photo editing can make or break a photo book. There is no one standard to move from a digital camera to a digital darkroom to a digital printer. What you see on the camera often bears very little resemblance to what comes off the printer. There are tricks involved. And that's where the learning curve really took off.

The first stage is to put all the images into sRGB color space. This is the color space used by the Epson printers that Blurb uses for printing its books, so the images will wind up in this color space eventually anyway. It's better to put them there first so that all the subsequent editing is representative of what the printer will see. Many cameras can be told to use sRGB color space, which is even better. For my own work, this is what I plan to do. For the WWKW 2009 book, I have to take what I'm given. Conversion first.

The next stage is to get an idea of what the printer will produce. This is where it starts to get tricky. There are two parts to this problem: The first is to make sure the monitor displays in a consistent standardized way. The way to do this is to get a colorimeter and monitor calibration program, and to use it religiously. I wound up getting a Spyder2 colorimeter with the Spyder2Express software. I spent an afternoon madly calibrating all the monitors in my house, and now when I start Photoshop on any of them and bring up a given image, they all render almost identically in terms of contrast, brightness, and color temperature. So far so good.

The second part to the problem is to get the ICC profile for the printers and paper Blurb uses, and to compare the images against it. Keep in mind that no actual image conversion is done at this stage. This just simulates, on a calibrated monitor, what a given image file will look like once it is printed on that printer using that paper and ink. It's not a substitute for an actual printed sample, but a good ICC profile used on a properly calibrated monitor is supposed to be pretty darned good.

The third part, of course, is to get a printed sample to compare against. So I spent most of my weekend putting together a 36 page test book with a number of images that could cause problems when printing. The book has been ordered, and should be here in a week or two. That's just in time for when submissions for the WWKW 2009 book are closed.

In going through the problem pictures for the test book, I ran into a couple of things I expect to see more of when putting the WWKW book together:

A number of images had patches of color that could not be reproduced on Blurb's Epson printers. When a color is outside the range of what a printer or monitor can reproduce, it's said to be outside of that device's color gamut, and that part of the image is said to be a gamut overrun. A lot of what I did with these images was trying various ways to get the colors back into gamut so that they print accurately. It wasn't possible in every case, and a number of images in the test book have patches that are outside of the printer's gamut. In some cases this was intentional, so I could see how the printer handled it. From what I gather it's like having a shadow area in an enlarger print that is just too dark for the paper to handle. It winds up looking muddy, with little to no detail. We'll see.

A number of other images had strong shadows that wanted to block up. "Blocked up" shadows are shadows with little or no detail. When detail does show up, it's typically a result of irregularities in the print medium or in image compression rather than any real details in the image itself. The result looks muddy and unattractive. In processing these, I did what I could to boost the level of the shadows enough that real details showed up when previewing the images using the Blurb ICC profile.

The counterpart to blocked up shadows is blown out highlights. In four color printing that basically means that no ink touches the page, and the underlying paper is the only representation at that point in the picture. No detail, no nothing. The trick here is to try to bring highlights down enough that texture and detail is preserved when previewing the images using the Blurb ICC profile.

One oddity that came up during this was a particular B&W image I used for highlight testing. I used it in two instances, one when doing color correcting, and one for comparing two choices in background. During the color correction comparison, the image was saved as an sRGB JPG for both the test image and the control. The test image had +1 green added to it to counter the magenta shift the Blurb printers seem to have.

But in the case of the background test, the image was saved as a grayscale JPG for one page, and as an sRGB JPG for the other. The images look very different once loaded into the Booksmart software. For the record, Blurb makes quite clear that all images are fed to the printers as sRGB JPGs. But when Booksmart does the conversion from grayscale to sRGB, it apparently shifts the gray scale values by quite a bit when compared to how Photoshop does the conversion. This is important to keep in mind when handling B&W images. The conversion to sRGB color space really does have to happen as the first step, or an uncontrolled conversion will happen later.

Other pages in the book test two page full bleed spreads, two page subframed spreads, tiled images, etc. I couldn't test every situation I'm likely to run into, but I tested quite a few of them. Even if the text in the test book is of no interest to anyone other than me, since it describes the details of each test, I hope the photography in the book is of interest, and that someone other than me will be interested in seeing it.

The test book should be here in one to two weeks. In the meanwhile submissions for the WWKW 2009 book open in three days, and I've got a lot of disk space to clear up before that happens. No matter what, one thing I learned while making the test book is that 90% of the work for the WWKW book will be spent preparing the images in Photoshop. I have a procedure for compensating the images for color shift, but each one of the images in the test book took a lot of manual manipulation to get the most out of them. There are no shortcuts.

But I'm looking forward to it.

Tom