Online Portfolio of E. Derik Clackum, Jr.

Welcome to the Online Portfolio of E. Derik Clackum, Jr. Here you can see projects I have done and also read about some of my work experience. To see various entries simply look to the 'Blog Archive' on the right; you can pull up whatever catches your interest or pertains to your particular field.

Image Resolution for Print II

A good place to begin is with a photo that may appear to be low res, but isn't really that bad because it is of a very large nominal size. I have no idea why a camera would be programmed to write a file that way, but let's take a close look at it (within the limitations of
the blogger environment).

To begin with I am using Adobe CS, as opposed to CS2 or CS3. That is Photoshop v8.0. I do not think that it will make much (or any) difference in what we will cover here though.

We will begin working with an image that I shot from my front porch recently. After I open it in Photoshop, I choose Image>Image Size (nothing surprising there).

The resolution is listed at 72 dpi, but look at the Width! 41.778 inches. That is a large photo size. But all that has happened here is that the relationship between the nominal Document Size and the Resolution has been inverted. If you change them back around you will see the true size of the file at 300 dpi.

First it is very important to notice that Resample Image is checked (at the bottom). You can also see this because only the Width and Height are "linked." This keeps the Width and Height linked together in proportion to one another if you make some sort of a change, but Resolution is currently excluded. So if I change the Resolution from 72 to 300 now, I will get a file that is 41.778 x 27.778 at 300 dpi, and Photoshop will have to process the file to calculate this out. Since that cannot actually add real image resolution to the photo and will create a document is 426% larger in file size, that is not the way to go.

So I uncheck Resample Image (which now links Width, Height, and Resolution) and change my Resolution to 300. The Document Size becomes a much more reasonable 10.027 x 6.667 inches. This is the actual size of the file at 300 dpi. So all's well as ends well and you should have no problem with most reasonable uses of this file.

The troublesome part is if your original size is 10.027 x 6.667 inches and your Resolution is 72 dpi. If you convert that to 300 dpi, you will see that you only have a 2.407 x 1.6 inch image to work with. That might be ok if it's going to be used at a very small size anyway, but most of the time that simply would not do.

You might need to play with these settings to understand what is going on here, but you should understand the gist of it.




Photoshop • Museum Quality Photo Restoration • High-end Retouching & Photo Manipulation • Illustration • Logo Design • Graphic Design

fireofgodimaging@gmail.com

Image Resolution for Print I

This is a topic I touched on in a previous post (see JPEG vs TIFF). It seems like a topic that should be quite worn out by now, but somehow it never is. Here is the simple rule: Ideally, your image should be 300 dpi at the size at which it will be used.

I say, "ideally" because that is the ideal for premium quality commercial printing results. Obviously, we do not operate in an ideal world. Now, Messiah the Prince (Dan 9:25), having gone on a long journey to receive a kingdom (Luke 19:12), will return shortly and change that completely (Rev 19: 1-16). No, I mean more completely than that (2 Pet 3:10-13). This means that if you are not an ideal person, you have a problem, and you had better get with Him about it quickly while you have time (Psalm 2: 10-12).

In the meantime, though it may not be ideal, you can scale your image up as much as 250-300% or maybe more and still print a decent image. But be careful when you get up that high, and take a close look at your proof.

The key point is the "at the size at which it will be used." If your image is 300 dpi, but you are using just a small section that needs to be enlarged, then it is not 300 dpi at the size it will be used. The more the image is enlarged, the less the effective resolution will be. So you have to take the time to get in there and see what it is at size.

For example; many digital cameras record their image files in such a way that the image is listed as 72 dpi, but if you look you will notice that the file width is over twenty inches! I have no idea why, but the (relatively) high res file has been written so that the image resolution that is there is "spread out." If you gather it back down to somewhere around eight or nine inches in size it will be around 300 dpi.

But, if the image is four to eight inches in width and only 72 dpi, there is really not much you can do with that. Yes, you can take it into Photoshop and just scale the resolution up from 72 dpi to 300 dpi, but the only thing you will have accomplished is that your file will take up more room. Photoshop poorly handled can degrade the quality of your image, but even expertly handled Photoshop cannot just add quality into your shot that was never there to begin with (no matter what they show on the Network Crime Dramas). If you have a truly low res image it's going to look like a truly low res image, no matter how high you increase the resolution to. You don't want to go to print like that.

In the next entry I will cover more detail about the relationship of the resolution to the nominal image size, and what you can do with that in Photoshop.



Photoshop • Museum Quality Photo Restoration • High-end Retouching & Photo Manipulation • Illustration • Logo Design • Graphic Design

fireofgodimaging@gmail.com

Reno's Bike

"Reno's Bike", Color Negative Film, shot on Pentax K1000, w/ Sigma 35-70mm.

Once upon a time we used to attend a store-front pentecostal/charismatic church that could reasonably be called a "Biker Church." Not that all, or even most, in attendance were bikers: probably half the membership were and half were not. Of the half that were, many were not really what you think of when you hear the term bikers. But some of these were serious bikers that had come to know Jesus Christ and led completely different lives from where they had previously been.

Well, very different anyway. They still rode their Harleys, and definitely did not fit in down at the First Baptist Choir Rehearsal. But they really really loved Jesus, and one of these was a guy named Reno. Formerly an outlaw biker involved in drug running, gun running, jail time, and gunfights (from which his arm and left eye were still scarred), he would have looked like the rough and scary guy he formerly was, except for the perpetual joy of a life in Christ that constantly rested upon his face in a broad smile and quick laughter. His Bible was always at his fingertips and "hymns and psalms and spiritual songs" were constantly upon his lips.

Where much is forgiven, there is much love. If you doubt the life changing power of Jesus of Nazareth, two hours at the dinner table with Reno would show you what you need to see. Ten Thousands of churches across America would be benefited by taking their clean-cut seminary-manufactured Pastor out of the pulpit and put a man like this in his place. Our nation would be better for it too.

One Sunday we had my beautiful wife's trusty Pentax K1000 on hand and happened to find Reno's Bike (he named it "Liberty" – partly from the feeling of exhilaration when he rode, partly from our Liberty in Christ, and, I think, partly from a sense of patriotism) parked on the sidewalk right outside the Church doors. Several people had to step over me to get in the door as I lay on the sidewalk trying to get the angle and exposure right. I never could get the inexpensive general purpose zoom we had on it to capture the narrow focal plane I envisioned, and in the end had to manipulate it in Photoshop (on my old Beige G3) to get the focus right in on the leather biker's vest with all the Christian patches on it.

And that really does say it all.



Photoshop • Museum Quality Photo Restoration • High-end Retouching & Photo Manipulation • Illustration • Logo Design • Graphic Design

fireofgodimaging@gmail.com

Process Control II

Fuji Platemaker; upside-down, inverted, out of register, and haywire because process controls were not diligently followed. Not pictured is customer, extreme right, walking away shaking head.

If you want to know that every plate is exactly where it is supposed to be you have to read the scale on every plate: not one in every set of plates (like the cyan plate from every 4C set for example), but every single plate! This might seem an awful lot of trouble to go through knowing that most of the plates will not have a problem, you do not read the plates for the sake of the plates that are correct! You read the plates for the sake of the ones that are wrong; because you cannot know that they are wrong unless you read them, and you need to read them because those are the ones that will jump up suddenly and bite you. Then when everything goes haywire the pressmen will be pointing at prepress, and prepress will be pointing at the press, and nobody will know if the proof is really good either because you don't have any readings on the proof.

Keep up that sloppy attitude and your shop might just go and join the The Large Corporately Owned American Shop with Massive Capital Resources (see Process Control I) in the Unemployment Line. Especially as the economy continues to shrink (and continue to shrink it will).

If you already have proper process controls in place make sure that you keep up with them religiously. If you don't have proper process controls in place and functioning earnestly, now is the time to do it. A good place to start is to learn as much as possible beforehand and then go to one of Dan Remaley's excellent conferences on color and process control, then have him follow up at your shop helping to set things up. If you do it, and you follow through with it, it will be worth every penny you invest.



Photoshop • Museum Quality Photo Restoration • High-end Retouching & Photo Manipulation • Illustration • Logo Design • Graphic Design

fireofgodimaging@gmail.com