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Printing custom books
February 28, 2008
From Gutenberg to the Indigo! This week spanned both extremes. Today I spent the entire day preparing files for the Indigo press. It’s a custom memento book publishing project that I have my students produce.
Similar to the books you can buy from
iPhoto (Apple) or
MyPublisher, the books we produce in my Digital Printing class are custom productions made from family photos and mementos. The students begin by looting their family’s photo albums and slide trays for those rare photos of grandma and grandpa, mom and dad’s wedding photos, and photos taken at the beach when they were little kids. The quarter begins with several weeks of making scans, correcting images, and learning about techniques in Adobe Photoshop for retouching, color correction and tonal adjustments. My motto for the first weeks is “No Bad Photos.” I insist that not a single bad photo make it into the final books.
Our No Bad Photos logo is posted prominently in the classroom.
From there, we move to FileMaker, where the students build a custom Digital Asset Management system, designed around displaying low-resolution images that are generated automatically with a Photoshop droplet and an accompanying Action. The database is the place where editing decisions are made, allowing the students to work within a strict budget of pages, and then using the database to select and sort the images that will appear in print.
The final stages – where we were today – include modifying and running an AppleScript that queries the database and passes information to Adobe InDesign about the names and locations of the high-resolution versions of the students’ photos. The AppleScript composes an automatically-generated book in InDesign. After some final touch-up – cropping, spell-checking, scaling of images, and the selection of type fonts for the captions, the books are ready to print.
From there, the students are required to impose the book pages into signatures for perfect binding, which they do in InDesign, producing a set of imposed pages ready for the Indigo press to print. I also introduce into the mix a bit of color management. The PostScript files they produce are created using a work flow that converts their images from the original color space (mostly RGB) into CMYK specific to our Indigo 3050 press.
The files are forwarded to the press, where two copies of each book will be printed – tomorrow morning – and then, during next week’s class, the students will hand fold and bind their two books into cloth-bound hard-back books using an ExactBind system in our bindery.
The whole experience is wrapped around the idea that digital printing technologies can encompass many disciplines, and ultimately produce a (priceless) work of art. On the production end of that process, printing companies with digital technologies can produce high-profit-margin products that are priceless to the buyer, and impractical in any other niche of the industry.
In the end, the students give their books to their parents and grandparents. Some of the books are so beautiful that they bring tears to my eyes. It’s quite an experience for all of us, and the students learn a lot while they produce these priceless mementos.
Posted by Brian Lawler on February 28, 2008 | Comments (2)
