Black and White Photography Blog, Vol. I

[About the image above - mixture of tungsten and flash; print on left is an inkjet; then the book. And just to hold stuff against the wall an aperture book. The overall is on the yellow side - I haven’t picked up the digicam in a while - but the rendition of the print vs. book is very close to how it looks to the eye.]

Also, please note that what I’m writing about is mostly about how black and white photographs are rendered with the process. Color shifts are really not that noticable with color printing.

Just the facts:

- What I ordered: 8 x 10 hardcover. 20 pages.

- What I uploaded, sRGB files (as advised)

- Ordered on Sept. 5th. Arrived today via UPS 2-day today

- The just jacket, as well as all the images have a fairly strong magenta cast in the midtones. But only under tungsten light. If I take the book and look at it with window daylight - it it fairly neutral.

- It is a stiched binding.

- The paper is definitely on the thin side compared to a high-end coffee table book but I think it would be okay if the magenta cast could be solved. I’m sure I could tweak the files to get something a bit more contrasty on the page. Except for the magenta, the images are very close to what I see if I soft proof the image with “paper white” turned on.

- If you look at the image with a magnifying glass, you can see how the magenta dots are wedged in with the grayscale dots. If you look at a book say by Aperture - you just see various shades of gray / black.

- I’ve put a help request in asking: a) what machine did the printing (Xerox or HP Indigo) and whether they have any suggestions for getting neutral b&w.

- The images seem flat and lifeless compared to my epson 4800 prints.

- If the inks exhibit metamerism (color shifts depending on light temperature), then there really is no good solution for this (with b&w). With color, it’s not as evident. And then you’ve got the problem with calibration of the Indigo printer as well. And even if you do manage to correct for magenta under tungsten light with some duotone layer, your next run may go towards the green side.

That is a problem.

What you need is POD that specializes in b&w photography. I guess that’s just too small a market?

P.S. If you search the blurb forums for ‘magenta’ you’ll find lots of people with the same problem: http://forums.blurb.com/forums/1/topics/32#posts-449

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From the comments:

So Dave, is the Indigo (blurb) better than the iGen (Lulu) or closer to a draw?
It will be interesting for us to know what tech says and if the problems are fixable.

Thanks, Bob

Bob - Blurb support got back to me very quickly (it’s all email which frankly is fine with me) - and asked to see some digital pictures of the problem - which is why I did the shot above.

Blurb also uses iGen for the paperbacks but this was Indigo.

Now Lulu v. Blurb, or is it really Indigo v. iGen.

Boy - that is a tough one. If Indigo inks are going to give this color shift for b&w than I don’t think it’s useable unless you do some tinting yourself (sepia) or something so that the shift isn’t as obvious.

On the other hand - toner is toner. The problem I had with the first two Lulu books I did as tests with Xerox iGen was that one copy was pretty neutral, and the same image in a second book had magenta streaks. But - I don’t see any color shift with the toner based books under different light sources.

I’m tempted right now to order a second book from blurb - but softcover - and with various test photos. This would use the iGen printer.
In other words, I can probably accept the iGen rendition if it doesn’t shift color.

The bottom line with print on demand is how consistent they can be over time. If I want to sell them, do I have to order 50 and check each one? Or can I rely on some consistent printing so that the customer can order it from their site - uh - on demand.

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Lulu has a new beta photobook interface (beta) and the paper quality is supposed to be a little bit better than the old color stock; but the beta interface is still pretty poor. For one thing, it really wants to crop or resize images to fit in it’s frame containers. And they don’t even have exact dimensions yet for the frames used by various themes. I’d give it six months for them to work out the bugs.

*** 9/18/07

Blurb support emailed me a return label and said they will reprint the book ASAP.

**** 9/26/07 - Sent the book back to blurb customer service ***