On or around Sun, 8 Jan 2006 18:48:15 +0000 (UTC), Simon Isaacs
<
[email protected]> enlightened us thusly:
>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!
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:
http://www.roman-road.co.uk/austin/1000hp/1000hp_1.jpg
http://www.roman-road.co.uk/austin/1000hp/1000hp_2.jpg
http://www.roman-road.co.uk/austin/1000hp/1000hp_3.jpg
some of which still show slight patterns.
'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.
>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....
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.
--
Austin Shackles.
www.ddol-las.net my opinions are just that
Confidence: Before important work meetings, boost your confidence by
reading a few pages from "The Tibetan Book of the Dead"
from the Little Book of Complete B***ocks by Alistair Beaton.