Chapter
5 Print Output and Proofing
Evening
recommends the Fujix Pictography, the Rolls Royce of desktop color
printers. This is one of the few A4 or A3 size (letter or 11x17)
printers that can beat the quality of a Kodak dye-sublimation printer.
The rest of the chapter touches upon various other printers, usually
rather high-end brands.
Relative
to the discussion of "poster inkjet plotters," I would
say that the quality of the Encad NovaJetPro, even at only 300 dpi,
is exhibitable quality if viewed from a normal distance (at close
inspection you can see all the individual dots). Encad prints hold
their color for months, even in substantial light. The new generation
of 600 dpi quality should look even nicer. The Mutah, OEM often
sold under other names, also sounds promising. There are a host
of new technologies in wide format printing which might be added
in the next edition of this book.
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Adobe
Photoshop for Photographers
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The
section on Epson inkjet printers might add that most early models
required special paper (expensive, up to $1 per sheet) and that
ink costs up to $1 per sheet as well (for the model 1500 A3 size
(11x17) more than $1 per sheet. Furthermore I found the quality
not up to what was claimed, and the printers frequently mangled
the printout. Besides that, they were painfully slow and kept the
Mac tied up the entire time. They also require buying a software
RIP in most cases, something the gullible buyer is not informed
of at the start (did you ever wonder why the printer is so cheap?
It is a freebee actually, just to get you hooked so you will buy
ink the rest of your life). If I am rough on Epson it is because
I feel stupid to have been suckered into believing their ads, three
dumb times in a row.
Laser
printers, especially the brands capable of handling photographs,
are not handled really at all. QMS,
Xante, Tektronix, and even Lexmark office laser machines are nowadays
capable of printing photographs in large quantities at relatively
reasonable price, certainly far more economically than an ink jet.
Color laser does a good job on normal paper as well. Epson ink jet
on normal paper looks like printing on kitchen cleanup paper.
The
paragraph on storing digital files might gracefully have cited a
more expansive source of information. He is correct about CD-R and
the advent of DVD, but DVD variations in themselves would require
an entire book to handle. There are web sites about every subject
in the world, so here it would have been good to reference a web
site that discusses storing digital files. The chapter on image
database management did not list Extensis's highly recommended Portfolio
system, not Virage, the ultimate high-end digital database management
systems. There are others as well, but if you use a system that
no one else uses, it is hard to trade data.The pages on Image Protection
are more informative.
Chapter
6, Configuring Photoshop
Back
to what the author is obviously familiar with, Photoshop itself.
I admire a person who can produce professional work on a 17"
monitor with 96 MB RAM. When Apple Computer provided (donated) a
Mac 9600 to the FLAAR digital imaging program, they outfitted it
with a 20" monitor (no 21" monitors were available) and
equipped it with 548 MB RAM, which I recently upgraded to max it
out at 800 MB RAM. I also replaced the Apple 20" monitor with
dual 21" (courtesy of ViewSonic).
A
computer technician who was working on my aging no-name PC clone
with a 546 chip said "why would you possibly need a better
machine, you have wide SCSI and over 100 MB RAM?" But the camera
I am working with is technologically capable of producing a single
photograph of over 1 GB in size (though I limit them to 410 MB to
parse in Photoshop, version 4 at that time; I do not know if Photoshop
5 can handle a larger file). The reason for the size is that we
are producing seamless 360 degree panoramas as well as circumferential
rollouts in turntable mode. Plans are to recreate certain items
of 6th century Maya sculpture at 1:1 original size (such as a stone
stelae 8 feet high and 36 inches wide). This is easy to do with
an Encad
wide-format printer, but requires a good sized file. If you have
five versions of the file open for comparative purposes (possible
with dual 21" monitora) you need all the horsepower you can
have. As the saying goes, "you can never have too much RAM."
In
the section on Extras, same situation as in Chapter 5, on odds and
ends of equipment. I find a level 0 RAID
useful, and need 36 GB on line just for handling a single project.
You can't do that with MO disks (we tried with 4.6 GB disks; you
can only couple two units together simultaneously). You surely can't
do that with CD-ROM
either. An entire disk would be filled with just two files. The
section on RAM memory and scratch disks is back to the author's
strong point, basic Photoshop as software.
With
respect to using Norton Utilities, it is the international standard,
traditionally. FWB HardDrive (or HardDisk) ToolKit, however, is
the new kid on the block. Besides, Norton Utilities was specifically
stated to be not allowed in conjunction with the Adaptec Ultra 2
and Remus softRAID system (told me by the technician when I bought
the system).
Efficient
Work Routines always sounds like a good idea. You can acquire lots
of helpful tips from this section of the book. Monitor calibration
starts getting deep into heavy going. The section on Photoshop color
management gets over my head since even Adobe stumbled on this one,
and had to rush out version 5.0.2 before being lynched. All books
available on Photoshop naturally cover version 5, so it is all the
more confusing, since the changes of .0.2 are not addressed in the
books.
The
rest of this chapter has quite a lot of important information, except
for the fact that now version 5.0.2 has changed the color spaces
again, so the reader may not know what parts of the description
of version 5.0 still pertain to 5.0.2. The overall information is
helpful for going to print. I guess I am always seeking a book with
information for desktop publishing, short-run, using a laser printer,
where there is no liquid ink, only toner powder. Considering how
much color laser has improved, and ink jet as well, more and more
people are going to be doing short-run printing on their own desktop,
so books devoted entire to printing inks might consider expanding
their coverage. Professors, for example, who need to print up handouts
for x-hundred students per semester. They are hardly going to sent
this to a printing press. Nowadays they can do it all in full color
with a color laser printer, especially now that 11x17" printers
are available they can collate the large sheets, fold them, and
they have a professional handbook in the format of a scholarly journal.
Chapter
7, The Work Space
Here
again is where you get your money's worth in tips, and why I recommend
this book for beginners and intermediate Photoshop users as well
as a good refresher for more advanced users if they want to fine
tune their abilities by learning from other masters, such as Evening.
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