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          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 [...]

Not all printing presses operate the same. There are many different printing processes, each requiring a unique machine, and each transferring ink onto paper in a unique manor. Therefore, for best results, each of these presses deserve unique file preparation (profile conversion) to produce their best results. Press speed, paper quality, and ink viscosity play [...]

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 [...]

While you may have a different opinion about this, hear me out.
Digital cameras and scanners deliver RGB images for good reason… RGB images (of all persuasions) contain MUCH larger color gamuts than any CMYK color space on the planet. There is a very good reason to keep it this way all the way through editing [...]

Try this question first. When are 8-bit color images really 24-bit color images? That was a trick question. But here’s a truthful answer: 8-bit color images are ALWAYS 24-bit images. EVERY color image opened in 8-bit mode in Photoshop is automatically a 24-bit image. Sometimes they are actually 32-bit images.
The calculation of bit-depth is figured on [...]