Darius Himes clearly describes the judging criteria for Blurb’s PBN contest.
Read more about Blurb’s PBN contest here.
Find Darius Himes book Publish Your Photography Book here.
Visit Darius Himes’ website here.
Learn more in my bookmaking resources here.
Darius Himes and Mary Virginia Swanson’s book Publish Your Photography Book offers clear cogent advice that will help anyone interested in navigating the waters of book publishing. This is true whether your goal is to work with a major publisher or to self-publish or both.
The book covers everything you need to know; concept and mission, financing and contract negotiation, editing and sequencing, design and production, marketing and more.
The countless case studies in this book give it a flair unlike any other. David Maisel, Daniel Milnor, Alec Soth, and Alex Webb are just a few.
The voices of experts in the industry give this volume a broad diversity you’re unlikely to find anywhere else. Eileen Gittens (Blurb), Michelle Dunn Marsh (Aperture/Chronicle), Rixon Reed (PhotoEye) are just a few.
I can’t think of a better duo than Himes and Swanson to help you understand the world of book publishing.
I can’t recommend this book more highly.
Find Publish Your Photography Book here.
Visit Darius Himes’ website here.
Visit Mary Virginia Swanson’s website here.
Find more bookmaking resources here.
What does it take to be a great workshop leader? The same things that it takes to be a great leader in any field.
A great leader communicates passionately. Then they fan the flames of other people’s passions. The one thing you don’t want to do with passion is hide it. Passion creates energy, commitment, and endurance. Passion is contagious.
A great leader walks his talk. Leaders demonstrate. They tell you the rules of the game and they also show you when exceptions prove the rules. It’s important to see how theory is modified by practice. It’s even more important to see when and how practice is customized by individuals.
A great leader offers guidance and direction. Leaders share why they do what they do and show what’s worked for them. Then they ask a set of guiding questions that help others frame what’s most relevant to individuals. Leaders help others frame their own unique set of guiding questions in ways that are most personally relevant.
A great leader listens. Different people want and need different things at different times. Leaders ask questions and look at results to find out what other people want and need most. Leaders don’t give other people their voice, they help others make their own voices stronger. Leaders understand that different people want different results.
A great leader helps others activate all their resources. Leaders help others consolidate and build upon their core strengths. You start with where you are and you move to where you want to be. You develop the vision to know where you want to go and the skills to get there. Leaders know that if you want to raise the level of your game, you need to improve both your inner game and your outer game.
A great leader recognizes and reveals group resources. Every group has a unique set of resources, because every group is a collection of unique individuals. Leaders bring out the often hidden resources within a group. When they do this, everyone becomes both a student and a teacher; everyone learns more, including the leader.
A great leader expands other people’s comfort zone. By inspiring people with more possibilities and demonstrating tangible results, leaders show others what’s possible. They challenge other people to periodically get out of their comfort zones and try new things. Conscious experimentation is a key to continued success.
A great leader empowers other people. Leaders offer optimum ways of thinking and working. They think clearly. They act decisively. They do this because they have experience. And, they share their experience to help others become more personally fulfilled.
A great leader brings all of their resources with them (passion, philosophy, history, education, connections, technique, tools, results), ready to make the most of every moment – and every individual.
So, being a great digital photography workshop leader involves far more than making sure people get to great locations at great times. (Of course, that’s really important too!)
Find out what people say about my workshops.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
X-Rite’s new ColorMunki Display and i1Display Pro make major leaps forward in color managing displays.
Technologically Advanced Hardware
Both ColorMunki Display and i1Display Pro devices feature an advanced, high-end, optical system with custom-designed filters that provide a near perfect match to the color perception of the human visual system, delivering superior color measurement results. Both devices fully support all modern display technologies, including LED backlight and wide gamut displays. Both devices are spectrally calibrated, making them fully field upgradeable to support future display technologies.
The ergonomic all-in-one design combines three important functions …
Ambient Light Measurement – an integrated ambient measurement diffuser allows you to to take ambient light measurements of your work environment.
Display Profiling – rotate the ambient diffuser arm and adjust integrated counterweight, with push button action, along the USB cord for display profiling ease.
Projector Profiling – rotate the ambient diffuser arm to use as a tabletop stand for device positioning, or use the built-in threaded tripod mount for larger venues.
Next Generation Profiling Software
Ambient Light Measurement – automatically determine the optimum display luminance for comparing prints to your display, based on a measurement of the lighting conditions where prints will be viewed.
Ambient Light Smart Control – the intensity or amount of ambient light surrounding your workspace affects the way you perceive colors on your display. These solutions can compensate for this effect and provide the option to automatically adjust your profile or simply notify you as ambient light conditions change.
Flare Correct™ measures and adjusts your display profile for reduced contrast ratios caused by flare light (or glare) falling on surface of display. By accurately measuring your effective display contrast ratio, you’ll have an even more accurate display profile.
Intelligent Iterative Profiling, an adaptive technology that produces optimized results for maximum color accuracy on each unique display every time you profile.
Automatic Display Control (ADC) technology automates the adjustment of your display’s hardware (brightness/backlight, contrast, and color temperature) to speed up the profiling process and eliminate manual adjustments to ensure highest quality results.
Find out more about ColorMunki Display here.
Find out more about i1Display Pro here.
Read more in my color management ebooks.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Knowing what to do with the color management dialog boxes you encounter while you’re editing your digital images in Photoshop is the key to making sure that the rich, saturated, wide-gamut color you choose to master your files in stays wide-gamut and doesn’t change – unless you want it to.
When you set Color Settings in Photoshop (Edit : Color Settings), you not only choose Working Spaces (RGB, CMYK, Gray, and Spot) to create new files in (Choose ProPhoto RGB for the widest-gamut color space.), you also set Color Management Policies that determine what happens when you’re dealing with files that are not created or edited in the same color spaces.
For RGB, CMYK and Grayscale files you can choose to turn Color Management Off, to Preserve the Embedded Profiles, or to Convert to Working color spaces. You rarely, if ever, want to turn color management off; you only do this when you want to ensure that no color space conversions take place, for example when opening target files for creating printer profiles. Similarly, you typically don’t want files automatically converted to a default working color space without your knowing that it’s happening, as they are when you set the policy to Convert to Working; you’d only want this to happen when you’re batch converting a number of files to quickly bypass color management dialog boxes. In the vast majority of cases, you’re better off served leaving the default settings at Preserve Embedded Profiles. This way, any time a color management operation is about to take place, you’ll get one of three dialog boxes that not only alert you but also give you control over how the operation is handled.
So what do you do when you encounter these three dialog boxes – Missing Profile, Profile Mismatch, and Paste Profile Mismatch?
Excellent Photoshop Color Settings can be set up in a few seconds.
1 Go to Photoshop’s Edit Menu select Color Settings.
2 Start with Settings of North American Prepress 2 and then change RGB to ProPhoto RGB. (Optionally change Gray to Gray Gamma 1.8.)
3 Click OK.
Here’s a little more about the underlying assumptions of this recommendation.
1. Choose a device-neutral wide gamut editing space to create your images in. Wide gamut editing spaces can contain all the data your camera or scanner delivers. Smaller gamut editing spaces may not. Preserve your high-quality information. ProPhoto is today’s preferred wide gamut RGB editing space. It’s the only default that can contain all the colors your camera can capture.
2. Minimize the number of color conversions applied to your files. Set Photoshop to Preserve Embedded Profiles. Always keep your master file in the color space it was created in. Convert only derivative files.
3. Make sure you know about all the color conversions your file goes through. Set Photoshop to alert you whenever a color conversion may take place. Check Ask When Opening / Pasting with Profile Mismatches and Missing Profiles.
Standardize your workflow, using these settings for all your work (with few exceptions).
Read more on Color Management here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Today’s inksets can exceed the gamut of even the best monitors in yellows, oranges, and blues. Epson UltraChrome HDR ink on Epson Exhibition Fiber is plotted against sRGB, Adobe RGB (1998) and ProPhoto.
The gamut of this image and the print made from it exceeds the gamut of Adobe RGB (1998) and the monitor. You have to make a print to see the most saturated color possible.
Choose a wide gamut editing space to make the best prints possible. If a file’s color space is smaller than the printer’s color space, you won’t be able to realize the full saturation your printer is capable of.
Today’s inksets exceed the gamut of all but one of the standard editing spaces (sRGB, Colormatch, and Adobe RGB (1998)), making ProPhoto the best choice for creating files in. Since ProPhoto exceeds the gamut of human vision, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever need a wider gamut editing space than ProPhoto. If you create your files in ProPhoto you’ll be well-positioned to take advantage of future advances in printer and media technology. So, choose ProPhoto.
How do you do this?
1 If you’re converting a Raw file, choose ProPhoto in the Raw converter’s interface.
2 If you’re exporting a file from Lightroom, choose ProPhoto.
3 If you’re creating a new file in Photoshop, set ProPhoto as your default color space.
4 If you’re scanning an image, choose ProPhoto in the scanner’s interface.
Four standard device-neutral RGB editing spaces compared
sRGB – red; Colormatch – green; Adobe RGB – blue; ProPhoto – full color
From small to large, standard RGB editing spaces include sRGB, Colormatch, Adobe RGB (1998), and ProPhoto. Only ProPhoto RGB can contain as much or more color as your camera can capture. This is why I recommend ProPhoto RGB as my first choice of these editing spaces. ProPhoto RGB has the widest gamut.
The term gamut is used to describe the total capacity of a color space. Wider gamut color spaces are capable of containing more saturated color than smaller gamut color spaces. ICC profiles are used to describe color spaces. ICC profiles can be graphed as XY chromaticity diagrams, which can be used to compare the gamuts of color spaces. On the center, axis are neutral colors. As you move away from the center color becomes more saturated. A larger area indicates a greater ability to hold more saturated data. The contour defining that area marks the gamut boundary, the limit of saturation that color space is capable of holding.
Capture your images in wide-gamut color (Raw) and edit them in wide-gamut color (ProPhoto RGB). Convert only copies of your master files into smaller gamut spaces for output-specific uses. Converting images from wider gamut spaces to smaller gamut spaces reduces saturation. Converting images in smaller gamut spaces to wider gamut spaces doesn’t increase saturation.
Why? Think of a bucket full of water. If the water is color, then the bucket that holds it is the editing space. If you pour water from a big bucket into a small bucket, some of the water will be lost. Pouring the smaller volume of water back into the larger bucket won’t make the total volume of water larger; it will be the same amount of water sitting in a larger bucket. Start wide and stay wide.
Read more on Color Management here.
Read more on digital Printing here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
ICC profiles define a meaning for the numbers used to represent colors in digital images. Without an ICC profile digital files will produce unpredictable and inconsistent results.
As a rule, always use ICC profiles. There are a few rules for using ICC profiles. Always assign ICC profiles (the correct ICC profile) when you create a digital file. Always use ICC profiles when converting digital files from one color space to another. Never remove an ICC profile from a digital file without replacing it. Use accurate high-quality ICC profiles. While there are exceptions to these rules, they’re rarely encountered.
Here’s one of the single most confusing things about color management. The same numbers in different color spaces produce different colors. Why? Because while RGB color spaces (including the standard device neutral editing spaces sRGB, Colormatch, Adobe 1998, ProPhoto) all use the same numbers from 0–255 to describe color, each color space is capable of different things. For instance, wider gamut color spaces are able to represent more saturated colors. The numbers used to produce the most saturated red (255/0/0) will produce a more saturated red in a wider gamut color space than they will in a smaller gamut color space. So the same numbers in different color spaces produce different results.
Here’s another way of saying the same thing: Change to stay the same. Use ICC profiles to define a source and destination so you can change numbers precisely to make sure colors stay the same. Once you know what numbers you need to produce the same color in two different color spaces (like a monitor and a printer), you can precisely change the numbers to produce the same color appearance as you move a digital image from one color space to another. If you don’t change the numbers, the appearance of the colors will change when you move a digital image from one device/color space to another.
Some change is inevitable when moving from a larger color space to a smaller gamut color space and ICC profiles can be used to predict how color will change. They can be used to show you what must change and can’t be restored (out of gamut colors) and what will change and can be restored (in gamut colors). While you won’t gain color quality when converting from smaller gamut spaces to larger gamut color spaces, you’ll lose a tiny bit of data, which if done a number of times can degrade an image. So, keep color conversions to a minimum. (Optimally, convert once when you acquire an image; a second temporary conversion will be made while you print an image).
Use ICC profiles. ICC profiles are recipes for color that clearly define numbers making color consistent and predictable. They’re the foundation for working with color in digital imaging.
How important is this?
See what can happen below if you don’t use ICC profiles correctly.
