|  One
thing that I like about printing books here in the studio is the control
it gives me over the printing process.
One thing that I don't like is that I don't have
control over the printing process.
I'm reprinting my Coxley Valley booklet and I've
decided, since it's quite a slow seller, that I'll print it as needed
in small batches here in the studio.
When I first published it, 6 years ago, I had the cover
printed professionally, so I need to re-design it for the process of printing
here at home.
 The
Perils of Publishing
It has been a classic example of the pitfalls of desk top
publishing:
-
Microsoft Publisher decided that my
acrylic painting of the stile by Coxley Dam would look better with
a dull orange gunge printed over it (below, on the left).
-
Macromedia FreeHand is better behaved
- voila!: no orange gunge, just like the image I created
in Adobe Photoshop. Phew.
But . . . my old Minolta QMS
magicolor laser printer is so clunky when used with FreeHand
that my precious toner ends up on paper from the regular tray, instead
of the card that I've just loaded in the side tray. Grrrr. And of
course, as with any other printer, there are the paper jams . . .
-
 For
reasons we now regret, we get our electricity supplied by
British Gas and when at last I get around to printing
the final perfect colour cover the electricity supply falters
and my artwork prints out in a deep magenta colourway instead of yellow
(right).
Soooo frustrating.
Not my Stile
Technical note: I'm printing the image
of the stile as a CMYK Tif.
It's taken some doing but at last I'm pleased with the results
and, along the way, I have acquired some in depth knowledge of colour
settings in Photoshop and FreeHand. But, sorry Microsoft,
I'm not going to risk your orange gunge overprinting in future.
Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk |
