Black and White Photography Blog, Vol. I

I have to admit. It is absolutely fascinating. Each POD book has such a completely different look. Maybe these were done with the Nexpress. The thing about Digilabs is that it looks like they are actually giving you digital photo prints. These are RC glossy prints that to my eye look as if they went through LED chemical process! I could be completely wrong - but that’s what the prints look like.

Their software is very good. There’s only one little problem - the prints are all brown. Not magenta. Not green. But brown - or maybe warm-toned if you want to be kind. (I’m kidding when I say this is a small problem - this is a showstopper). I’ll be things would be a lot easier if I were working in color.

They offer two on/off filters in the software: sepia, b&w and a switch to remove filters. If you are going a full bleed with white space around the image, you can quickly see that the sepia filter is on because the white margins turn sepia. However when you switch on the b&w filter, you don’t see anything change. What’s equally frustrating is that when you go back to the project, or at any time - you can’t tell if you’ve turned the b&w filter on or not. The button doesn’t gray out or anything to show that the filter has been applied. I had done a few prints in the book with the b&w filter on - but I’ll be damned if I can figure out which ones. The software won’t tell me and I can’t see any difference with the prints, although one print does sort of look more neutral, but that could be because there aren’t many middle tones in the image which is where the the warm tone comes through the most.

But wait - there’s more.

The cover, nice as it was - was also scratched - in several places. Sharp, straight scratches. Just a few, but I noticed them as soon as I took the book out of the protective casing.

Whether you like a book that appears to be photographs rather than printing, is another issue. And as I say, maybe it’s just the paper they’re using that gives this effect. There are also a couple of black specs here and there that look like toner. But I’m not a lab so I didn’t send them in for analysis.

The binding - although it’s sewn - it is very visible - and sort of looks loose. I don’t know, maybe that’s because there’s not enough pages (25). Man, I always try to give all these guys the benefit of the doubt don’t I.

But apparently - there can be some issues with the binding since they include a sheet labeled: Care Instructions for Your New Photobook.

One section is titled: Environmental Considerations. The book “…should be stored in a cool, dry location. Temperatures exceeding 122F and relative humidity above 45% will cause irreparable damage…”

Overview

“Your new book is constructed using high quality materials and techniques which enable it to last for many, many years…”

Before You Open Your Book

1. Prepare a clean, flat, hard surface large enough to open your new book flat without any obstructions.

2. Make sure your hands are clean and dry.

3. Remove your book from it’s plastic sleeve.

The First Time You Open Your Book

1. Lay your book on your work surface face-up, and carefully lift the front cover until you feel resistance.

2. Use the heel of your hand to gently press against the area where the cover and the pages meet.

3. Use an ironing motion as you slowly bend the hinge until it is easier to open.

4. Repeat the process for teh back cover hinge.

Extra Credit

Your case-bound book will never lie truly flat when opened, but exercising its pages now will make it easier to enjoy, with less tendency to shut itself.

1. Open your book approximately to the middle, and lay it flat on your work surface.

2. Use a gentle ironing motion with the heel of your had to flatten the spine somewhat.

3. Repeat this process for each page, working your way from the middle to the front; then from the middle to the back. [I’ve put this section in bold. It’s been a long time since I’ve ironed anything, much less each page of each book I sell.]

Now that you’ve given your book it’s first workout, it will be easier to enjoy without fear of damaging the spine.

Really - that’s the note that comes with the book. Phew. I’d better get into better shape if I plan to order a bunch of these.

Received Greek novel which has my Boy With Dog image on cover. The novel is called, Boy at the Pier.

Hey - what happened to the dog? Cropped and photoshopped out. Here’s the original for your viewing enjoyment.  Now I just need to brush up on my Greek.  Speaking of photoshopping, now the Yanks are going to have to photoshop A-Rod out of all the promo pictures.

My own book is coming along now. I’m dealing with about 75 images and it’s starting to take shape. I’ve changed the name for the 90th time. Now it’s very working title is, Manhattan Moments although there are so many long exposures, I should call it Manhattan Minutes.

“Amateur photographers and independent filmmakers looking to chronicle bird life, take snapshots in Times Square or capture the distinctive thrum of New York’s streets will not need to obtain permits or insurance under new rules being proposed by the Bloomberg administration…” Here’s a link to the Times article:  Mayor to Ease Permit Rules for Capturing City’s Image

At least I think so. I set up an account with the Post Office online so that I can print Priority Mail labels directly from my Paypal account. I think what’s supposed to happen is that when you go to order a print, you get two choices a) Priority Economy which is really Fedex and that there is the usual charge for and b) Free Shipping, which is Priority USPS.

I can’t figure out how to test this sort of stuff since I can’t send things to myself through PayPal. Also, someone did buy a Paypal Gift Certificate yesterday. I understand what’s supposed to happen, but again don’t know how to test it.

Paypal has something called the Sandbox which is a testing environment with a different Paypal email; but I couldn’t get it to work. I emailed Paypal about it a few days ago, but didn’t get any reply.

I shouldn’t even be doing this stuff since I’m getting a fair amount of orders lately - but I want to see how it works before Christmas.

The book continues to be all consuming (much to my surprise). A lot of late nights working on it. Since it’s mostly just pictures for God’s sake, you’d think it wouldn’t be so difficult.

Here’s the current insert for the debossed square, front cover of the book. You have a choice with Shared Ink between the debossed 4 x 4 inch image on the front; or gold or silver foil stamping. (Two lines on the front of the book). You can also have a larger die cut with your logo (wish I had a logo) but that costs more. Wish my last name wasn’t so long. The closest I could come up with was that there must have been a baker - way back n the dawn of history on the Beckeman side of te family tree - but couldn’t get very far back.

The furthest I could go back continuum-wise was a great great-grandfather who owned a rowboat in Poland and rowed people back and forth across a narrow river. Funny thing about that rowboat. When I was going through my anxiety waves about leaving the business world, I had a recurring dream where I’d just left a luxury liner to step into a small rowboat find - facing massive ocean waves. It wasn’t a scary dream. I felt safe in the small rowboat.  So maybe great- great grandfather was offering psychic guidance. I don’t get much psychic dream guidance - so any amount is welcome.  Spirits - feel free so long as it’s better guidance than you offered while you were still part of this mortal world.

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One other thing occurs to me - for all the people that are appropriating my work either for their own sites, or blowing it up for other purposes - is that it isn’t exactly easy to copy an entire book. I mean, you could if you really set your mind to it - but to recreate this book with the same quality isn’t going to be easy. I know you might think this is an odd thing to write - but so many people expect to just take photos off the web for free - or as I say - just blow up a print - or whatever - I sort of like the idea that the book isn’t so easy to reproduce.

INTRODUCTION

As far as I know, there are currently 3 printers being used for print on demand Photobooks:

Xerox iGen (toner-based); HP Indigo (4 color inks, though it is possible to upgrade this to a 6 color printer) ; and Kodak NexPress (toner).

I don’t believe that any of the books ordered are using NexPress.

There are some things I’ll never know - such as how the quality of the book changes from one order to the next, since as I rule out various POD publishers, I’m not ordering any books from them. If you’ve been reading along during these postings - you’ll see that I began with Lulu (two years ago) and have decided on SharedINK.com as the best solution for me. I have signed up for their Premium Professional Photograper Program. Although this has all taken a lot of time and effort, if you are serious about giving your prints a good home - then SharedInk is the place. Second on the list would be MyPublisher.

With all of these printers, a lot of the quality depends on paper choices, and especially on often and carefully the machines are calibrated. This is a major issue with print on demand technology as opposed to traditional off-set printing. I don’t imagine it’s such a big deal if you’re printing your latest novel, but it is a big deal with professional-looking photo books and even more of an issue if you are using a four-color system for a black and white printing.

For black and white printing, you have two choices: 4 color (cyan, magenta, yellow, black); or strictly black and white with either one toner color or ink (black).

The tonal range with four color is wider than with all grayscale printing - but you then take the chance of color shifts, or various types of color added to the b&w photo.

Grades are from A+ (the best) to F (awful) and are slanted towards the final result. Ease of use, turnaround time, price, I don’t give these as much weight as I give the final quality of the final product. For example, if the turnaround time is great, and the book looks like crap, then I don’t give turnaround time much credit. Somebody else might look at these grades and say, I loved my Blurb book. Or I couldn’t stand using SharedInk. In short, as much as I’m trying to quantify this, a lot has to do with my own biases, and esp. my biases towards black and white printing (which is a big factor).

VioVio was a softcover book, not hardcover like the rest. And I haven’t put Lulu into the grid because I tried them almost two years ago. I still have the physical book I did with thm, and they were the worst: streaking magenta, grainy, and thin paper. But as I say, that was two years ago, and so I haven’t included them in this chart. This grid includes books produced during the last two months or so. The other

Online vs. Client software. Online means that you upload jpgs, or pdf file (could be both) and arrange the book online. Client side means that you download and install software on your PC / Mac and eventually upload it through the software to make the book.

Blurb is sort of odd because their client software still is marked as Beta. Although I didn’t have any major issues with it, their forums are filled with people who are having issues going from one version to the next; along with program lockups etc. Sometimes these issues don’t arise until you’ve done a book with lots of pages. On the other hand, some of the other forums have more moderation, so there could be similar issues that I’m not aware of.

None of the client software is perfect. For example, MyPublisher is easy to use, and seems stable and well-thought out. But the supplied templates aren’t as flexible as say the Blurb or Digilabs software. But MyPublisher has many features that Blurb doesn’t offer. If you are doing your project with client-side software and haven’t done an upload and the program stops working for you - then you could be in the position of losing your work. On the other hand, none of the web-based interfaces were as easy to use as the client-side software.

Turnaround time is more important than I first realized. If you are doing Print on Demand and it takes two weeks to get a book produced, and you are shipping to clients, than this can be an issue. You may decide that you need to order a bunch of books at one time, rather than order one each time someone requests a book. On the other hand, if you have “built-in” clients, such as what a wedding photographer has, and you know about how many books you’ll need, then slight differences in turnaround time may not be a big deal.

In my own case, MyPublisher was so quick, that I’d feel comfortable ordering individual books as the orders came in. The other plus, and an issue to keep in mind, is where the company ships from. MyPublisher, shipping from New York, saves me money on shipping since I’m in New York. Also, if you are doing a bunch of test printings, then cost and time to get the book is equally important. At any rate - turnaround time in the grid doesn’t include ship time. Also to keep in mind, is that turnaround time may be related to the complexity of the book, and of course - time of year.

Consistency from Order to Order. This is something I can only guess at. But as a general rule, the larger and more diverse the POD publisher, the less likely that you are going to get consistency from order to order. Blurb books are sent out to various printers, as was Lulu. And whenever two books were ordered at different times, the color management and printing were different. I still have two books done by Lulu, one leaning towards magenta, the other one towards green. With Blurb, I returned the first book because it was overly magenta, and the next book arrived, with still traces of magenta - but with better (less grainy) printing.

Other notes: SharedInk - I’m using the Professional Photographer program.

CONCLUSION

I’ll fill in some of the empty cells in the grid, at least for Digilabs as I go along. But the bottom line, is that I’m hooked on SharedInk. It’s true that they don’t supply client software, but the process is also very simple. You create the page according to their specs as a ” 10 quality” jpg and upload it. This can be via FTP or through their web interface. You can rearrange the pages online with drag / drop.

You preview the book, make your material choices, and in about ten days you receive a very beautiful book.

The old saw about Garbage in, Garbage Out, still goes; and one of the things that you need to realize about making POD fine art books, is that you’ve become the printer. You need to know how to “open the shadows” for printing; the best sharpening techniques; and of course - how to make an interesting book. If you were working with a good fine-art printer, you’d be looking at proofs and teling them what you’d like done to tweak the images. Now there’s no one to tell - that’s going to be your job. You’re responsible for calibrating your monitor. You’re in charge of page layout. The more you know - technically - the better your chance of producing a high-end book - so long as the folks on the other end are also artisans.

Other quirks: Blurb was especially annoying because they give you an estimated ship date, and then miss their own estimation by a couple of days. You pay 10% extra for their “silk paper”but frankly this paper crinkles easily. As you turn the pages, if you are doing double-sided printing, the image from the backside shows though. They say that there product is like a coffee table book you’d buy in a store. This isn’t true. At least VioVio is honest about what you should expect.

MyPublisher has the best client software, but unlike some of the other client software you can’t move the template containers around on th page. MyPublisher also forces you to pay (order) before uploading. You also can’t add fames to the image container.

[Note, since I wrote this I’ve also ordered a book from Picaboo.  Haven’t received it yet - but their client-side software is every bit as good as MyPublisher, maybe better.  However, I haven’t figured out if there’s a way to have automatic page numbers inserted.  Their pricing is about halfway between MyPublisher and SharedInk.  MyPublisher just has so many discounts that it’s hard for anyone else to compete.  But, it should be noted that Picaboo does have a professional photographers program with a 20% discount on all orders.  Not quite the 40% discount that MyPublisher routinely offers, plus MyPublisher cost per page is cheaper - still if Picaboo quality is better than it’s worth a look.]

In short, I’d cross Blurb off the list. VioVio is a maybe for a softcover book. MyPublisher for a hardcover book that is moderately priced.   The MyPublisher softcover is small, and the cover isn’t great - not a laminated cover - but the print quality is the same as the medium-sized book and the price is right.

SharedInk for the best quality (and support - assuming you are doing this through their Professional Photographer program. I don’t know what if any are the differences for the general consumer process). But pick two PODs and do sample books that are as close to the “real” book you’re planning. That’s the best advise I can offer.

One note about Digilabs. I don’t know what paper / printer they used, but it had a distinct “photo quality” look and fairly heavy sepia tone. None of this is bad if that’s what you want; but it didn’t feel like a book to me, more like a collection of photographs that had been bound together.

Wow.

(If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ll know that I don’t use the Wow word often).

But - wow.  The SharedInk book arrived a few minutes ago.

Linen 8″ Square Book (8.25″ x 8.25″) - $44.95
Price includes up to the first 20 printed sides; $1.00 per each additional printed side.

(This size is only available in the Pro Photography Program.)

No comparison to any of the other books in terms of quality. Paper is heavyweight gloss (they also offer matte finish I believe). I did the linen cover with a small debossed square that an image fits into. I’m not crazy about this. Next one will be with foil stamping on the cover.

The binding is absolutely first rate. What I mean by that is that it is sewn, and linen cloth is nice and tight, and there are a ton of options for flyleaves (the inner pages on front and back that attach the book block to the cover). Also, nice touch is the semi-transparent page before your title page.

I’m still working on a post that compares all the POD publishers - but for now I’ll just put up a ranking list based on quality. Other factors such as software, turnaround time, support, cost, ability for other customers to buy through their website, etc.) aren’t considered. Also, note that VioVio was a softcover book. What is considered is tonal range, color shift, binding, paper, and overall impression.

Also - this only regards photobooks. It doesn’t apply to your latest novel.

#2 MYPUBLISHER.COM (the paper quality and print quality don’t compare with SharedInk, but compared to the guys following on this list, it is in a class above. It also has the best software for doing the book layout; and an amazing turnaround time.

#3 (Okay I’m still waiting for Digilabs book but I’m guessing it will end up around here in the list.)

#4 VioVio (at least they got the b&w prints neutral and allowed grayscale files to be uploaded; though this is not going to give as rich a look as using four color process for b&w.

#5 Blurb (worst hardcover book. thin paper. book had to be redone because of excessive magenta. not remotely comparable to a real coffee table book.)

#6 Lulu (for b&w photos, tested about two years ago. it may have changed since then. but lots of quality control issues. and very xerox toner looking prints.)

You really cannot judge the quality of any book based on pictures of it, or specs. You have to hold the book in your hand, turn the pages, and feel the thing .

The same goes for support. It’s impossible to fairly evaluate what sort of relationship you’ll have with the publisher until you run into a problem. Ditto for their bookmaking software.

My guess is that as a rule, you will do better with a company that specializes in books, and that is small enough so that they can do decent quality control. In other words - total automation where there are several print vendors and binderies involved is going to make it tougher, if not impossible, to turn out a consistently good product.

So I’m excited now to continue with my SharedInk project and hope to have copies on hand for the Christmas rush.

Can anyone tell me how to have the paypal cart only accept payment from countries that I ship to? I’ve set up a list of countries in the shipping calculations section with appropriate postage charges, but it seems that I still get orders from countries that are not on that list.

On the Payment Receiving Preferences page I don’t want to block payments with non-US paypal accounts because that will block all international payment. I have the radio button selected to convert currency to US dollars.

Other than that I don’t see how you prevent someone from ordering a print from a country that I don’t want to ship to.

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Spoke with Paypal.  The reason I couldn’t figure out how to do this was because there is no way.  Their suggestion - you can refund the payment if someone buys something from a country you don’t ship to.  Not exactly elegant.

All my blog energy is going into the book project.

I’m doing it with MyPublisher. I love their software. Much easier than doing the layout with inDesign. Also the turnaround time was just so fast - and the fact that they’re in New York State means that shipping is faster and cheaper for me. Their turnaround time was  three days, and with two-day Fedex shipping took one day. In other words, from upload to delivery took 4 days.

They also offer frequent and substantial discounts.

It’s turning into quite the project.

(Haven’t gotten SharedInk book yet which should arrive Tues. And Digilabs book hasn’t shipped yet. Both are on the west coast).

MyPublisher book arrived a few days ago. So far, this is the best quality. I will receive SharedInk book this week, and in a few days will get my Digilabs book. At that point I will post a grid with various features of the companies I’ve tried. But I will tell you that MyPublisher was the fastest (by far) in terms of turnaround time; that their software is very easy to use; and that the hardcover 8 1/2 x 11 has the heaviest paper so far, a good dust jacket that you can fully design (including inside flaps), and neutral b&w images. I’m pretty sure it will end up coming in 2nd to SharedInk but will wait for SharedInk book and digilab book before doing full evaluation. One drawback with MyPublisher - they don’t offer a square format, or volume discounts; on the other hand they almost always have a promotion going on - which can give substantial savings.

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I also come to the conclusion that no matter what I write - there is only one way to get a good idea of the differences between POD publishers, and that is to hold a book and compare it with other books. The best way to do this might be to start a small user group - maybe yahoo? where photographers who are working in b&w could eventually arrange a show-and-tell. Bring your books to a coffee shop if you live in NYC - and let’s pass ‘em around. I suspect that the group would only need to meet once for people to make their choices. Another way would be to donate sample books to some place in New York where anyone could stop by and see samples. Maybe a library would allow that?