Image Processing of Publishing

Finding My Way through the Image Processing of Publishing

Another busy morning and I took time to photograph the book cover. When I edited the photo by adding brightness and contrast, I noticed that there were alligators in the background of the cover which I hadn’t noticed before as the cover color is dark. What a nice surprise… but only nice if customers can see it. I posted the picture to Facebook.

I decided to go through the photos in the file and grayscale them. I looked more closely at the photos in the book. Yes, they are still dull and lifeless, but I noticed, too, they are grainy and there are vertical lines like when the printer is running out of ink or the print head is dirty. I also noticed that the maps, while better than the photos, also have that running out of ink look.

I heard back from someone who bought the e-book. She said that the photos are okay, though a little dark. The e-book has the color photos. I do tend to be a little dark with my editing. I don’t know if it’s because of my eyesight or the computer screen doesn’t show the pictures as dark as they will be printed. I have to work on how I “see” the pictures in the editing program and add more brightness and contrast if needed. When I think the picture looks perfect, it tends to print dark.

I tried to take that into consideration when editing the photos for the book. Still, it’s hard to know how they will print in a book. The types of printers, inks, and the book pages play a part in how the images will look. The colors on my program are RGB and the ones at AuthorHouse uses a “CMKY color space,” whatever that means.

I often find when grayscaling my photos, I have to add quite a bit more contrast than from the color photo. So did AuthorHouse just hit a grayscale button without tweaking the photos?

So, I struggle through a Sunday wanting answers or to at least talk with a consultant to be able to resolve these issues.