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How Long Will Blurb Books Last ?

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How long will your Blurb books last?
100 years in dark storage, 45 years in average display conditions, before visible fading occurs.
Blurb books are printed with HP Indigo presses. HP shares Henry Wilhelm’s permanence data. “The study gives pages printed with HP Indigo presses a Wilhelm Digital Imaging Research (WIR) Display Permanence Rating of approximately 45 years, which is longer than the best-rated silver-halide photo paper, Fuji Crystal Archive. The HP Indigo rating is also more than twice as long as the WIR Display Permanence Rating for prints on Kodak silver-halide photo paper. The study also shows that HP Indigo photo book prints received a WIR Album/Dark Storage Rating of greater than 100 years.”
Stay tuned for announcements on my upcoming New York and Toronto Blurb seminars.
Find my Blurb book Antarctica here.
Learn more in my Fine Art Digital Printing Workshops.

NAPP's Lightroom 3 Learning Center

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Lightroom 3 (now in public beta) offers a lot of great improvements.
As an upgrade, it’ll be a must.
Want to get ready for the next version of Lightroom? NAPP offers 9 online video training sessions on the new Lightroom 3 Beta.
The New Import
Web Publishing
Watermarking
Improved Vignettes
Improved Noise
New Grain Effect
Develop Enhancements
Slideshow Improvements
Custom Printing
Plus there’s an interview with Lightroom Sr Product manager Tom Hogarty.
View them here.
Download Lightroom 3 Beta here at Adobe Labs.

Getting the Best Color from Blurb

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The image above graphs Blurb’s ICC profile inside sRGB.
Graph Blurb’s new ICC profile and you’ll find something interesting. Blurb’s printers exceed SWOP (standard web offset presses) and they exceed sRGB in cool blues and yellows. What this means is you’ll get the most saturated color if you convert your Adobe RGB 1998 or ProPhoto RGB files into the Blurb color space rather than into sRGB. (Note you won’t get this is you convert sRGB files to the Blurb color space because you’ve permanently lost some saturation by going to sRGB first.)
The image below graphs SWOP inside Blurb’s ICC profile.
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Find my Blurb book Antarctica here.
Catch my Blurb seminar at Palm Springs Photo Festival – March 31.
Learn more in my Fine Art Digital Printing Workshops.

Images From Death Valley Workshop

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Here are some first pass image selects from my recent Death Valley workshop. They won’t all make the cut, so this may be the only time anyone will ever see some of them. I’m really excited about the material I collected for composites.
We had such great locations, weather, and participants that I scheduled my Death Valley February 18-21, 2011 workshop today.
Find out more about locations in the Death Valley map we’re building right now.
Check out alumni Harry Sandler’s blog posts from the workshop.

Photography's My Favorite Form of Exercise

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Photographing. It’s my favorite form of exercise. You walk, climb, squat, bend, reach, stretch and more – much more. You lose track of time and how far you’ve gone. You just keep going. You always want to go farther. It’s exhilarating! At the end of it all, you feel great and you return with something to show for it. I recommend it to everyone.
This image shows me walking across Badwater during my recent Death Valley workshop.