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If you are one of the millions of folks who assume that we are producing more accurate files for print today and that Adobe’s CS3’s conversion profiles reflect current printing technologies, you might want to think again. 
First, realize that the US Web Coated (SWOP) v2 profile is currently used for most of today’s print projects, regardless of [...]

I was just reflecting on the last decade of technological advancement in the publishing industry and thinking of all that we have accomplished. Let’s review:
Faster computers. Processing speed has increased exponentially. We process enormous-size files in mili-seconds. There are virtually no limits to our ability to push pixels around. I have 4 gigabytes of [...]

         Normally, your eyes don’t see anything in just one dimension. But pictures, whether on a monitor or in print, represent only one view, not two, like your eyes see.
         Close one eye and look across the room. Now open it again and see the difference. When your eyes observe [...]

 
          In case you hadn’t noticed, printing images in the newspaper is an abysmal undertaking. While pretty much everyone knows that this morning’s newspaper is tonight’s birdcage liner, few people truly understand the stark reality of newsprint’s (lack of) dynamic range let alone what to do about it. [...]

One of those (not so new) great thing about today’s ink jet printers, both large and small, is that they print really great black and white prints. And the way they can do that is by extending the range of the tones by using two different black inks; or to put it more accurately, a [...]

I’m writing a book  called “Correct Color” for a major publisher. It is a guide to achieving accurate color in printed digital images. In the process of “due-ing the diligence” thing and researching existing published materials for the project I read a significant number of other peoples’ books on similar topics. 
While I always learn new things [...]

Great care should be taken when boosting saturation in a digital image simply because there is a thin line between optimal saturation and luminance damage. Photographic saturation has a scientific definition and a practical definition. I believe we need to recognize both in order to really grasp the issue.
Photographic saturation is basically color intensity, expressed as the [...]

By now we all know that 8-bit images contain 256 levels of color spanning from solid to no color at all. And if we do the math (2×2×2×2×2×2, etcetera, ad nauseum) we see that higher bit-depths deliver exponentially-higher amounts of tone between solid color and no color. 9-bit images contain 512 levels, 10-bit contain 1024, [...]

What does unsharp masking have to do with image sharpening? Well… very little in one respect, but a lot quite a lot in another. The term originates from a very unlikely source. Check it out—
In the lithographic pre-digital world of color separations, continuous tone CMY negatives were produced by placing red (#25), blue (#47B), and green (#58) Wratten [...]

Have you ever wondered why printing companies request that files be sent to them in pre-separated CMYK format? Well, wonder no more…
While printers claim that they don’t want the responsibility of converting files to CMYK without the customer seeing the files after conversion from the larger RGB color space to the always-smaller CMYK space, that [...]