101ers Sixstud out yet?

At the printers, will be in the post early next week. I think you'll agree that the wait is worth it - I've got a proof here, quite a work of art.

Super Ta!

Lee

On Fri, 06 Jan 2006 13:16:27 +0000, Mother scribbled the following nonsense:

did you get your GLASS mag Martyn? SWMBO wants some feedback....

Arrived yesterday morning - give her a huge thumbs-up :-)

One thing I've always not really liked about the GLASS newsletter, and this is nothing at all to do with whoever edits it, is the quality of the b/w photographs on printed page.

This current issue is no exception - some superb pics, especially from NGLD but not best 'printed' - just my opinion (I know very little about photographic reproduction on modern printed pages, I've just vague memories of using a dot filter when printing photographs in the darkroom for the union newsletter - and that was 25+ years ago!).

As I say, nothing at all to do with layout or editing and I have a great deal of sincere respect for anyone taking on the thankless job of magazine editor for any club - Dawn has done well, and I hope she is recognised for the effort that wen't into it.

Now... Photographs of committee members??? Hmm... that'd better never catch on in our club mag or I'm orf!

as would be a lot of the club members! :p

On Sat, 07 Jan 2006 20:42:25 +0000, Mother scribbled the following nonsense:

cant work it out either for the photos, as they look ok on the screen, and when we proof print it home on my Samsung Laserjet they look okay... The printing company are looking at it!

A word of warning for all budding editors out there.... *do not* use MS Publisher, it causes more aggro than it is worth.... OK for home printed stuff, but useless for commercial printing. Then again, it is MS software, which tends to make it useless at anything....

On or around Sun, 8 Jan 2006 18:48:15 +0000 (UTC), Simon Isaacs enlightened us thusly:

I've found you can get silly answers with different screening fighting eachother: scan a screenprinted photo at e.g. 300 dpi and it comes out with patterns on it, scan the same photo, without having moved it on the scanner, at e.g. 313 dpi and it has different patterns. A certain amount of faffing around can usually get a result with acceptable level of pattern on it, sometimes in conjunction with post-processing to remove the patterns.

examples:

'course, if it's direct import photos and not scans, I dunno. Worth noting that glossy magazines work at 1200dpi at least, now - so a 6x4 picture, say, is going to be 7200x4800 pixels, which is much more than yer average camera does and more in fact than any digital camera. A decent scanner now may scan at 1200dpi real resolution, but anything less decent will be interpolating anyway.

There are other aspects when printing in monochrome - like where in the process it's converted to a greyscale image. I tend to reckon on supplying a colour image for the printer to convert, but you have to get it right - too contrasty an image can get even more contrasty when converted - sometimes, it's worth deliberately lowering the contrast in the colour original. Then there's always the chance that someone accidentally save is as the wrong file type and doesn't notice... there's a fax format which looks at first glance to be a tiff file, for example, but renders literal black-and-white images.

bleck. I tried using it once, ages ago. DTP of choice here for many years is pagemaker, currently version 6.5 which is not exactly current, but that's 'cos I can't afford the latest version. Mac types tend to swear by QuarkExpress, ISTR. Pagemaker does everything I want it to and can do such things as producing 4 separate images for 4-colour process printing and the like. Main problem is compatibility, as ever. I tend to produce oversize originals (for adverts and the like) which they can scan and reduce to maintain the quality. The other possibility is to print to a postscript file or convert to PDF - all depends on what your printer (the person, not the machine) can most effectively deal with.

This is "moire patterning", a common problem. Some photo manipulation packages have processing tools to get rid of it, but I tend to just avoid scanning in halftone images (e.g. newspaper photos) as they're the worst.

Best bet is just to convert to greyscale yourself, it's hard to judge how much contrast will be in an image when the colour is removed, ask any photographer who's done B/W arty work. The problem comes from the way the RGB channels combine, if your package allows it you can get the best results by combining the luminence data from the three channels in differing amounts, as well as the obvious way of manipulating the levels curve. The three channels method can bring out some areas of the image more than others.

On or around Mon, 9 Jan 2006 08:12:59 +0000, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

indeed. however, I've had silly result from supplying printed originals for scanning. In the end I supplied a colour original and it worked better.

and the fact that different software does it differently, of course.

It's not so much the software, but light itself, photographers who work in monochrome have the same problem in that two colours that are easily distinguishable resolve to almost the same shade of grey. A trick I used to use when photographing monochrome shots was to hold up red, green and blue filters in turn (holding them all up together results in no light getting through!) to assess the contrasting areas of the image from the individual colours, and sometimes I'd take the picture through the filter if it worked better in one colour than the other. The film stock was of course monochrome so the colours never made it to the final image.

There are filters you can get that claim to remove colour from images when you look through them although I doubt they are that effective as I'm not sure how such a thing would work and have never seen them.

However with a computer you can remove the colour from an image, extend the levels of the monochrome image and then tune it in the software to the output curves of the printers that are used. You could even add solid black and solid white squares outside of the cropped image once you've got the levels right so that the print shop would know exactly what you wanted, although I've never worked in a print shop so have no idea if they can justify tailoring individual images at the relevant price point.

I'm told though that PDF these days is the best format to give to a print shop for complete pages.

This is how our club mag is produced. LaTeX output to .pdf then ftp'd to the printer.

Heh, you are a geek after all, even I stopped using LaTeX about a year ago for anything other than personal letters, I've used it since 2001 for producing customer reports and since 1993 or so for most things, have now moved to Open Office but intend to produce them using Java over the next year or so.

Probably Java outputting SGML mind ;-)

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 13:48:38 +0000, Ian Rawlings scribbled the following nonsense:

we used pdf to get it to the printers, but MS managed to shaft that too.... Now have a copy of Adobe InDesign, which is meant to be the dogs dangly bits, after Quark, so we'll see how she gets on....

I've not read it yet but i'm impressed by the fancy new packaging! - though it almost got filed with the junk mail until i turned it over!

and congratulations to the cover star! :)

Tom Woods uttered summat worrerz funny about:

Blimmey! Wait till I show him he'll be chuffed to bits.... then again best not show him.. enough bits already!

I'm humbled, last version he got half the centre fold. This issue front cover, where does it all stop :-)

He'll be giving signatures (oil stains) at the next meet ;-)

Lee

I knew him before he was famous! ;-)

I remember him as a GS...

Mother"