Best materials for scanning for a Blurb book.

[erikg]

Flatness is important. do you think it's possible for RC to look like fibre (e.g. I prefer the look of FB to RC, but I suppose you could manipulate the latter digitally)?

I print on Ilford most of the time and I can get RC and Fibre prints to match pretty well. On the other hand, if you have a drymount press or just put your prints under weight for a couple of days you can get an 8x10 fibre print pretty darn flat, so either way.

Don't worry about print color, what I would do is scan RGB, desaturate in photoshop, and at the end convert to the CMYK profile Blurb recommends. If you want to give the image a tone, I would do so with a curve adjustment layer, but you may be asking too much of this type of printing to get a subtle color tone exactly right. Neutral is probably safer.

I like Blurb, but I have also seen nice books from Adorama and A&I.

Best of luck, it's very satisfying to hold a real bound book of your own creation.

Erik

 

[Mark Layne]

When I recently asked a similar question it was unceremoniously deleted. I haven't participated in the site since

 

[removed account4]

John, thanks for replying.
What does 'deep fix' and 'rz' mean?
Cheers.

hi ...

erkg beat me to it !

scan-deep
... scan 2x or more the resolution you want your final to be
so when you fix / dust &C it won't be evident ...

rz down
... save it at a lower resolution + the size you want it saved for your publication

its like skng and saving things for the gallery here,
you wouldn't skn anything at 6x8 @ 72dpi ... dust &c
but you would skn it at 300 or 600 so you can remove the dust &C
and when you shrink it down to 72dpi your "fixes" are not visible ...

have fun !
john

 

[tomalophicon]

Thanks everybody. I'll be starting the quest soon and will post some results if worth posting.
Tom.