A couple of weeks ago I sent off the files for Hold on to Your Horses to the printer. The printer contacted me and told me that the files were all RGB and they needed to be CMYK. Then there was this whole huge muddle where I asked my artist to do a pile of extra work which turned out not to be the right solution at all. In the end Howard rescued the project and has provided a solution and I’ve finally managed to admit that I don’t have a clue about image editing. I can pull things into photoshop and push things around to see if I can get an effect that works, but that isn’t true expertise. I don’t even really understand the difference between RGB and CMYK except that I need one for computer screens and the other for print. I am smart enough to learn this stuff, which is what I was trying to do. But I couldn’t learn it fast enough and so I was failing miserably until my resident photoshop expert took the project from me.
The solution is to have Howard do the scanning of originals and the image preparation. With this goal in mind, the originals were mailed to us this morning. I am once again stunned at their beauty. I thought the electronic images were pretty, but in the originals the colors seem to jump right into your eyes and make you happy. I am in awe that such beautiful work was done in support of my words. I can hardly wait to share it and I wish that the electronic or print versions were able to reproduce the glory of the originals. Unfortunately reproductions always lose something. Flat ink on paper can not possibly recreate the luminescence of layer after layer of colored pencil refracting in the light.
The whole muddle figuring out how to get the images done correctly for print was really awful. But I will forever be grateful that I got the chance to see all of the originals even if I don’t get to keep them. I’ll have to be content with the single one that I get to keep and frame.
RGB works with *additive* color. That is, you are adding colors of light together to get the proper color *emitted* from the screen.
CMYK works with *subtractive* color. You are mixing pigments to subtract colors from the white light hitting the page so that the proper remaining colors will be reflected.
C+Y causes green to be reflected.
R+G cause yellow to be emitted (or that’s what it looks like to our eyes)
I’ve taught and supported DTP for 15 years. The best book I’ve found for introducing and explaining a lot of computer<-->print concepts is Looking Good In Print. While it does have hands on computer stuff, it’s mostly about explaining desktop publishing concepts and ideas and the technology behind it all.
This book used to be Mac-centric but now that Adobe has made inroads to Windows, it’s cross platform.
Hope this helps.
Which picture is the one you get to keep?
::irrelevantly curious::
They had similar problems when they went to print my grandma’s collected poetry and art. it came down to my uncle reformating the whole book for reprint after the first few copies came out illegible.
Ona