Photographic and printing considerations

Photographic and Printing Considerations

I discovered Silver Efex Pro 2 from the Leica M monochrome camera, which provides a free edition of the programme, but not by buying one! I found this programme gives considerable latitude to black and white digital processing and can substantially enhance black and white images.

Langmead & Baker Ltd has experience in magazine and book publishing, with InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom etc; however, this does not mean there was nothing to learn. The hint came from John Swarkowski ‘s The Photographic Eye… ‘172 duotone images’, back cover. I had already made the decision to do the book in black and white, which is not uncommon, but many photographic books are only printed in black. The difference using duotone is enhanced contrast: I have used mustard yellow as the second colour, which is also on the back cover. The method is simple enough in Photoshop, converting the 8 bit image to grayscale first and then to duotone, which gives a facility up to quadtone. The separations are produced by cancelling CYM and leaving process black and panatone 117c, in this case, which is now a two-colour lithographic printing process. Utility is not increased for me by using tri- or quadtone.

The first time I did this, I followed the consensus of advice on the web, using .eps files. Not only are these are very big files, .eps is an outdated file type and the general consensus is now tif or .psd; before I  used .jpg. Another c-change is I now use .dng exclusively. So my duotone sequence is

• .dng 
• silver efex to .tif 
• photoshop duotone, not rastered, because the photographs are also to be used large
• saved as .psd for Indesign

I have three books planned directly, four actually, because the first one has technical and production errors, which I will learn on reflection.