Fire of God Imaging

Online Portfolio of E. Derik Clackum, Jr.

2010-05-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-01T13:19:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-29T14:09:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-04-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

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

Process Control Part I

2009-04-27T06:10:00.000-07:00

Fujifilm CTP Platesetter, Photographed by me, on Pentax K1000 and scanned from color negative.

This subject is of more import if you are a Printer or Prepress Professional than a Graphic Designer, but if you design for print you need to know about it, especially if you're in a position to view color proofs or press sheets for approval.

I think I mentioned somewhere that I got hired into the prepress trade in a German owned Prepress House (Haus?) that was dedicated to process control like no place I have seen since. At the time this was unremarkable to me: having no other experience in prepress I assumed it was just a part of the job. Certainly the German management made no fuss about it, nor did they walk around talking about "process control." In fact, I cannot recall ever even hearing such a term or anything about the importance of it. They just did it. And every phase of every department was marked by it.

I was not able to appreciate that fact until after I had taken a job at a large corporate owned American prepress house. For example, this shop had one, and only one, grimy set of System Brunner's 'Brunner Control Strips' for each of the two proofing systems they used (3M Matchprint and DuPont Cromalin). This was deemed adequate, though, as that one set was seldom used, unless something "went wrong." The German shop, by way of contrast, had multiple sets of Brunner Strips available, which were kept clean and replaced regularly. Where the German shop changed exposures in the proofing dept constantly throughout the day to keep the readings on the Brunner Strips exactly where they were supposed to be, the American shop might change exposures once a day – if someone bothered to run the strips. The German shop required a correctly exposed Brunner strip on every proof with densitometer readings attached to verify it – and that's every single proof on the sheet, not every proofing sheet that might have four to eight or more proofs on it. The American shop expected that a strip would be run once every shift, but it often wasn't, and seldom was anything written down.

So I guess you could say that the American shop also did not walk around talking about "process control" or the importance of it, and that every phase of every department was marked by that as well.

As a side note, The Comparatively Small German Shop is still in business. The Large Corporately Owned American Shop with Massive Capital Resources has been out of business for quite a few years now.

For a long time I thought that this was just a part of A Tale of Two Prepress Houses. After I had more knowledge and experience though, I began to suspect that it was not coincidental that the German shop was so big on process control. I began to think that maybe it had something to do with the fact that they were German, that maybe Germany was the Land of Process Control and we Americans have just been rather slip-shod about the issue.

Some years after that I worked for a shop that used inkjet proofing – my first experience with that type of proof. "How consistent is this system?" I asked soon after starting work there. "Extremely consistent," was the reply. "How do you know?" I asked, not seeing any controls in place to demonstrate that. "Well, it just stays real consistent." I can tell you from experience that this particular inkjet proofer was very consistent, but we didn't find that out for sure until almost three years later! In the mean time we had no proper way to read and verify each particular proof, so there is no telling how many times things went haywire because of a bad proof. And this place had some of the most critical color I have ever seen.

Later at that same shop I had a similar discussion with the prepress manager about the fancy DTP Platemaker. That wasn't normally my area, so I wasn't too familiar with the protocol. As you might expect, I started asking questions to begin with because things had gone haywire. I wanted to nail down what were the known factors so we could look at the unknown. It turned out that they weren't reading the plates! There was a little scale you could read, and an excruciatingly expensive gizmo to read them with, but there were no readings. "How," the prepress manager asked me,"with this fancy so-and-so and these type of plates and all this various mumbo-jumbo is there going to be any drift on these plates?" After thinking about it, I had to admit that I had no real knowledge of the mumbo-jumbo, the nature of the plates, or the so-and-so, "...however, I can tell you that things change. Things go wrong. If you don't read these plates you don't know where they are. What if it's us and not the press after all?" I got more or less blown off that day, but guess what we later found out? The plates were wrong. Turns out after all that all the fancy stuff is still only as good as the vigilance of the guy running it.

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

fireofgodimaging@gmail.com

Pour, B&W Magazine Ad

2009-04-24T13:10:00.001-07:00

Another oldie but goodie...if you haven't seen the previous post for the Pour CD cover check it out. Being an indy band they had to market and sell the CD on their own. I can no longer remember the name of the mag this went in. Most of the parameters were predefined by the purposes and limited budget of the band.

The background is a piece of marine fossil-bearing stone of some kind laid on a flatbed scanner. I previously referred to high-end drum scanners in my post on Scitex, but flatbed scanners are a handy item to have around. You can drop all sorts of interesting things on them to incorporate, like my hand, say, or a piece of mylar with Karo Syrup dripped on it. Which of course we did here, and incorporated it all in Photoshop.

Actually, it was my wife who scanned the Karo Syrup: she's very handy to have around for innovative ideas like that.

What kinds of projects you need innovative ideas applied to?

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

fireofgodimaging@gmail.com

JPEG vs TIFF

2009-04-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

Dandelion Head in Dew. Shot in JPEG on a 6MP Nikon D40 by my wife. Enlarged 600% in Photoshop, then reduced to 660px width 72dpi.

Are you a serious print professional? Prepress, Printer, Commercial Photographer or maybe Ad Designer for print? As a serious print professional do you insist on high quality TIFF files for all photos? Do you sneer inside when some hack...err...that is customer sends in a JPEG attached to their .indd? Or advise your clients that they might want to consider a more-professional Professional Photographer?

I did. I was raised in a work environment that featured top of the top shelf print photography and separation. When the transition from Scitex to Macintosh came along (see "Scitex," below), TIFF was the only acceptable format to replace the Scitex CT format (except PSD). In fact, it was always standard protocol when supplied with a JPEG to convert it immediately to TIFF – if the customer could not be prevailed upon to resupply us with a TIFF replacement – as if that conversion was going to magically impart something that hadn't been there in the JPEG!

Well, for one thing, just look at the file size: 60MB for a high res TIFF vs 2MB for an equivalent JPEG? Obviously you are losing an awful lot in the translation! And in truth we have all seen JPEGs pushed beyond the limits of decency for the sake of file compression, producing images that look as though they are composed of glass masonry blocks instead of pixels. Add to that the prevailing industry prejudice against JPEGs and it can appear that there is no excuse for anybody using the foolish little things. It has been an unquestionable tenet of Good Prepress.

So you might imagine the look on my supervisor's face a few years back when I suggested to him that we might run tests to see if we could actually replace our overstuffed TIFFs with the much more efficient JPEG. It looked a lot like the look on my face when that idea was first put to me.

If you do any web based research at all about Nikon DSLRs – as I did around that time prior to purchasing the wonderful Nikon D40 – you are bound to encounter Ken Rockwell. For those of you who have not, Rockwell is a photographer and unabashed Nikon aficionado who obviously spends all his waking hours writing on his photography-blog-on-steroids www.kenrockwell.com. Part photography class, part hardware review site, part family album, and part op-ed page, Rockwell posts reams of photography related material every day.

After years of refusing to make the expensive switch to digital, I had finally seen that digital photography was reaching the convergence of affordability and quality that would impel my wife and I to abandon our beloved Pentax K1000s and take the plunge. I had seen the pitiful results of a $1000+ Sony digicam my mother had purchased years back, and had been repeatedly frustrated – whenever in contact with any digital camera of any expense range – by the lack of control over the operation of the camera, the futility of trying to get a good shot while holding the thing in midair trying to view with the screen, and the absolute refusal of such cameras to simply take the shot at the moment that you actually pushed the button. Megapixels kept climbing up the marketing ladder by the millions, but the photographs still looked like some Flintstones gerbil was in there chipping it out with a set of Crayolas.

To explain my aversion to the digicams, I may need to back up a little. When my wife and I were first married (24 years ago), my parents or grandparents kindly gave us a little Kodak Disc camera. It was very thoughtful gift that would allow us to get photos of our budding family right from the very first. The only problem was, after seeing the results, I put it in a drawer and almost never got it out. In fact, after a while I couldn't even find where it was. Later someone gave us a 35mm snapshot camera, but the only real difference I could see was that the film was more expensive. It soon joined the Disc camera in the Lost Drawer. Later someone tried again with a 35mm point and shoot that had auto advance and a couple of levers, but the results were quite the same. While explaining the situation to a colleague, he asked, "Have you ever tried an SLR?" I'd never even heard of an SLR, but we soon went out and bought our first K1000, and we've been confirmed shutterbugs ever since. (In fact, one reason we never advanced beyond the K1000s in film cameras is that my wife literally shot so much film even with a manual advance that I had little time to shoot on my own for re-supplying her.) So there could never be any thought of accepting pitiful photo quality for the convenience of going filmless; I knew the digicam would quickly find its way to the Lost Drawer.

Then came the DSLRs. It was still a bit hard to part with $1000+ when you could pick up a K1000 for less than $100 and there were tons of great Asahi lenses dirt cheap. I even enjoyed shooting with my older Pentax Spotmatic using the Sunny 16 rule, but the truth was that we were much more apt to shoot than to develop film, and it was always stacked up in our refrigerator. DSLRs had large sensors (for a digital camera), and good quality photos. It was almost time to make the switch, and we wanted to make sure we picked the right DSLR.

One criterion I had my mind set on was that it had to shoot TIFFs, and preferably shoot RAW. So when I read Ken Rockwell's assertion that shooting in TIFF is a waste of space, and RAW was a waste of space and time, I figured he didn't have anything else to say that I needed to listen to. But just in case, it might not hurt to run a few tests...

Well let me tell you, having run test targets nine ways to Sunday, if you are using TIFF, you are completely wasting your storage space. I know that storage is cheap these days compared to years gone by, but waste is waste. Take any high resolution TIFF, shot or scanned, convert it to JPEG at a quality of 10, and you will not be able to tell the difference. Enlarge it. Print it. Make a contract quality proof. Take it to press. I have no idea what in the world TIFF is doing with all that space it takes up, but the truth is that it's not packing in all kinds of extra quality that will show up somewhere down the line. Even at a JPEG quality of 8 it's really tough to find a difference. For sure you don't want to use middle or low quality JPEGs, but come on, 50 extra MBs? At a profession print related shop that quickly adds up to a lot of wasted gigs...a whole lot of wasted gigs. And work or home, wasted disk space is wasted copy time and wasted money in storage hardware.

Think of it this way: pretty much any photo for print or web or personal use is going to be 8-bit anyway, not 16-bit. So it's not like your going to capture all kinds of super-high artistic level quality to begin with. If you're going to print, whether commercial print or just a little Epson photo printer, it's going to be printed in CMYK so you're going to lose a lot from your 8-bit RGB gamut that is there. Even if you stay in RGB for display on the Web you're going to convert to a limited resolution file of around 72dpi (even 300dpi for print is actually a limited resolution) so you're still going to lose image quality. Any way you slice it, these uses are not going to exhaust the quality of a good JPEG unless you need to enlarge far (I mean real far) beyond what was originally shot, and TIFF won't help you there anyway.

Now, if you have a situation where you are scanning (or shooting) at extreme resolution in 16-bit, then you have a necessity for TIFFs, but that just isn't very common. I used to work on images for Delta airlines where the imaging was done at a very high end studio in Atlanta. They were scanning in (probably large format) photography in high res 16-bit, retouching and tweaking color to create beautiful, beautiful images of Delta planes in billowing clouds at sunrise or sunset, filled with stunning purples and crimsons and so forth. Then they were outputting these images on a film recorder to actually produce large format transparencies – as though they had been shot that way on a large format camera. It was all very wonderful except that when we scanned these transparencies for print we produced high quality CMYK scans. The jump from extremely high res 16-bit RGB to 300dpi 8-bit CMYK is quite significant, and the ad agency could never understand why the proofs didn't have all those out-of-gamut purples and crimsons no matter how much time we spent on it. (They wasted barrels of money getting these things made, and then barrels more trying to match the impossible.)

Run some tests. Save yourself some time, space, and money.

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

fireofgodimaging@gmail.com

Scitex

2009-04-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

In my last post I referenced a time when Photoshop wasn't even a blip on the radar of serious prepress houses. When I first got into prepress (1985) it was a very different world. Images came from enormous drum scanners (like Hell Scanners) that spun medium and large format professional transparencies at very high speed on very expensive glass drums around high end scanner heads, and good scanner operators knew their CMYK values for various colors like neutral gray and (theorectical) flesh tones like the back of their hand.

Color correction was a time consuming process, and scans had to be top notch right off the scanner. Color correction to the scan had previously been done on the film by chemically etching it in wet sinks by hand with paint brushes. Recently the industry had largely switched from continuous tone film process to "half-tone" film which used half tone dots to create the images (as we still mostly use today). With the switch had come "Dry Etching" which was done not by chemical etching but by duplicating film at various exposure lengths through masks in vacuum frames.

Type was set somewhere farther upstream by typesetting professionals with expensive typesetting machines, which produced high quality prints. These were pasted up onto board layouts much like contemporary scrapbooking. In the prepress house there were enlargement cameras that took up as much as a 15' x 25' room which was used to shoot film negatives of the type and various layout items. Assembly was done by stripping together the film negatives of all the various elements on multiple layers that were then exposed in series onto one piece of film for each separation. "Stripping Departments" used many skilled men who sat at light tables all day long with tape and Exacto knives putting that all together.

But a new and very expensive technology had come to town: Scitex, an Israeli company who's logo was intended to be a high tech representation of two hands folded in prayer. Today the Scitex name is barely even spoken in the printing world, but from the mid Eighties to the mid Nineties Scitex reigned supreme in the world of prepress. Suddenly, you could handle your color correction and image retouching electronically, removing much of the necessity for film while producing a far superior product. I remember an old prepress veteran at that time remarking that you used to be able to look at hand retouched printing and say, "Wow, that's very nice retouching," but you could still tell it was retouched even if it was done very well. Now with Scitex you couldn't even tell it had been retouched if it was done well. And that changed everything.

For one thing, every skilled journeyman in every department knew that if they couldn't manage to get onto a Scitex machine their days were numbered. So there was enormous pressure and competition in that regard. The Scitex stations themselves were large computer stations that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases up to a million. Skilled operators were well paid, and Scitex used to operate three full time, always booked in advance schools in the U.S. (Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York), to which trainees were sent for a very expensive two weeks introduction and training. You might have two or three different stations as well as an film output device and the drum scanners that were hooked into a large mainframe computer room with tall cabinets standing shoulder to shoulder. They stored data on large tape reels, and when they were processing you could watch what they were up to on a series of red flashing lights on the front of each cabinet in the mainframe room. After you spent enough time watching those little lights blink you could more or less tell what the machines were up to and how close they were to complete processing. It was like some kind of hokey science movie or something.

It would be hard to overemphasize the importance and prestige of Scitex at that time, and I have no idea how much money they were raking in. Scitex subsumed and eliminated much of what had existed in Prepress, and there was no real competitor. All roads, it seemed, led to Scitex. But today, you can fit many times that amount of data on a dinky little flash drive on your keychain for $40 or less. A used Mac Mini would completely blow the whole system away in processing power and speed. You can accomplish far more with $800 worth of Photoshop than the most expensive dedicated Scitex retouching station (the Blaze Prizmax) with its proprietary retouching software. And that's basically what happened.

Desktop publishing came along at the end of the Eighties. The first desktop publishing setups were, to be honest, rather silly seeming, and it it was impossible to believe that they could offer any real competition to the Scitex giant. Maybe they could sit in the corner and set some type or something. Even as Apple computers steadily moved in the doors, and computing increasingly became faster and cheaper, I could never bring myself to believe that Scitex would really be left standing still while their entire industry was taken away from them by this dinky little smiling wannabe computer. Then one day an announcement was made: "By this time next year we will be completely Macintosh. If you want to have a job this time next year, make the switch."

I couldn't believe it. Moreover, I thought it a considerable business mistake. But I started making the switch. And once I did I was surprised. The computing ability of the Mac had indeed become equivalent to or better than Scitex was, and that was before even the Beige G3. Mac was an open platform and any third party could market software for it, so Photoshop 2.5, for instance, was actually better than the Scitex color correction and retouching software. (Quark was miserably inept compared to Scitex at that time, though it did improve considerably since.) The little Apple desktops were more prone to freezes and crashes than Scitex, but even a very expensive Mac station was only a small fraction of the expense of Scitex, and you could make hardware and software upgrades on your own. The competitive environment of the Mac allowed it to out compete proprietary Scitex. I wonder where all that old Scitex equipment ever got off to anyway?

These days people even use PCs for printing and prepress. After all, as Apple has continuously led the way in technology and improving the overall computing experience through the years, Microsoft – buggy, half-baked, and hacker prone though they may be – has indeed done a decent job of putting a down-and-dirty cheesy version of it in the hands of the masses. PCs may never be as sophisticated, cool, advanced, or cutting edge as Mac, but they are practical. We have seriously considered buying a PC ourselves on several occasions...but...well...I mean come on. As Spike Lee said, "Do the right thing." If money is the deciding factor, better a used Mac than a new PC. (Besides, we have kids in the house, you know?)

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

fireofgodimaging@gmail.com

Scanning Color Negatives

2009-04-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Digital photography is getting better and better, and with the advent a few years back of the affordable DSLR, like the Nikon D40, professional grade digital photography is within the reach of most anyone who really wants it. Of course just buying a digital camera won't make you a better photographer, but the results on a good camera leaves the old film negative experience in the dust...for most people anyway.

But, there are still an awful lot of film negatives hanging around. Most of the time if you want a good copy of one of those your best bet is to have a good color enlargement print made, but sometimes you may want to scan it instead. If you have ever tried that one, you may have been baffled by the results. The first time I ever saw this tried was during the Atlanta Olympic Games. The Prepress house I was working for had a contract with some big name magazine to scan hundreds of frames of Olympic photography that were shot each day at the games. For some reason the Photographer(s) in question used only color negative film (I would guess because you can get faster ISO speeds with color negative film than with slide film and they were trying to capture the action shots). It took a lot more work than anyone had guessed for the lead scanner operator to figure out a decent process to handle these things, and the results never did look quite right. I didn't know enough about it at the time to do more than watch (and Photoshop wasn't even a blip on the radar screen of serious prepress in those days – everything was Scitex). But the results I get now are better than what they got then.

You might think that you could just scan yourself a decent scan of the negative and invert it to positive with Image>Adjustments>Invert in Photoshop. If you do, you will get something that looks like this.

This is a photo I took years ago of my nephew's hermit crab. They happened to have a handy collection in the yard of organic debris (i.e. stick and leaves) that I brought the crab out to, sprayed it all down with a water bottle, and took a few decent photos. The problem is a thing called the "orange mask." I do not know much about what the orange mask actual is or the reason for it, but it is a part of the chemistry of all color negative film. The process of making color prints takes the orange mask into account, and if you want to scan your color negatives you will too.

One solution I have seen recommended is to invert the negative image in Photoshop and then perform Image>Adjustments>Autolevels.

This actually can work pretty well, as you can see, depending on the exact image. You must consider that the operative word is "auto," which means it cannot evaluate the particular image you are looking at like a live human being can. The other issue is that different film manufacturers each use a different orange mask, so auto-whatever cannot figure that out for you. If the image happens to be a good match for the parameters of this function, good. If not, not so good. Most images I have tried are not. This happens to be the first image I ever tried Auotolevels with, and it gave me more hope for the utility of this method than proved to be warranted. As I tried to convert other images I was not too impressed with the results. As I figured out what I was doing I found that I could still do better, even when Autolevels did OK. After all, Photoshop can do a lot of nifty things, but it doesn't have a "Care" button.

This is what the image looks like after I custom converted it in Photoshop. As noted above the Autolevels function didn't do too badly on this one, so the difference from there to here isn't going to make you run around the room with your arms in the air in astonishment. You can see however that the custom conversion has greater depth and better overall color. The range of the image is greater, the midtones are fuller and the highlights are less blown out. If you were going to make a good print or use it for process color (if you really cared in other words) you would definitely want to use the custom conversion. If you just want to stuff a jpeg on your laptop to show Grandma next Thanksgiving, the Autolevels version might be ok (since Grandma doesn't really care about hermit crabs or good photography anyway). If you want to make people wonder if there's something wrong with you, you might just Invert it and stop there. Or even hang up the un-inverted negative for that matter.

So what do you have on hand that needs more expertise or care than you have?

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

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Sweet Spirit Fellowship, Youth Program Illustration / Logo Design

2009-04-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

This is another Photoshop / Illustrator mixed media work. In fact, I do believe there's even some background weirdness from KidsPix mixed in. There used to be a really cool third party filter set available for older versions of Photoshop (Photoshop 4.0 at this time) called Kai's Power Tools. KPT later got subsumed into some other name that is still available (at least I think it is) but it just isn't the same. The older KPT was very useful for generating various and interesting textures that you could employ in retouching (or "magic work") if you knew how to put it all together. That was where I created the beginnings of the lightning on the sword and all in the shield.

Yes, this one is definitely over-the-top, like you might expect for a piece intended for teens, and contains a lot of Biblical imagery. Like other pieces I have done, I intended it to be simpler, but it just kept growing in detail and in richness. The "X" is not a roman numeral, but refers to "Generation X"; a common term in the public dialogue at that time.

What do you want brought to life?

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

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Campbell Printing Co., 2007 Wall Calendar Series

2009-04-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

After the ignominious demise of the 2006 Wall Calendar (see entry below), I did not want to get too far down the road on design without being very sure of where the concept was going and that all the appropriate management was on board. I also decided not to get too avant-garde in the layout.

Initially this one also was slated to have green theme, and I worked out a couple of different concepts to mock up and submit. Somewhere after that the eco thing got shelved, and I was asked instead to produce a calendar design that would utilize existent carpet photography of each of the company's "big five" clients, all commercial carpet mills, each to receive a different calendar using their own carpet. But make sure to choose current carpet styles. Oh and let's have a different person's name on each calendar printed for the specific individual that will receive the calendar.

I don't know about you, but I do not consider even the best carpet photography to be very interesting at all. Although I understood the reasoning behind the concept, remember, the point of the whole exercise is to get these things on the wall so that the company name is kept visible. And If I spent all my waking hours in the design, manufacture, and marketing of carpet – even if I really loved my job – the last thing in the world I would want to look at on my wall at work would be pictures of carpet. So I considered this project a significant challenge to pull off.

Once again I turned to Photoshop. And some techniques from the past.

If you look at the Pour CD Cover (see entry below), behind the Rising Sun there's an image with symmetrical, fibrous, organic looking something-or-other. The something-or-other is actually pine straw. It had occurred to me that a scanner full of pine straw might be a really neat background. Unfortunately, I was rather wrong. It gave the whole cover a very "Hee Haw" kind of look. But as I was searching for a way to guide and salvage the feel of my original idea, I stumbled upon the idea of mirroring the pine straw vertically and horizontally. Made it look a bit like a very ornately woven basket or something. Very cool. So I thought I would try that technique on the carpet shots.

But as you can see, the calendar for each customer would require fitting in several mirrored carpet shots (five different styles are present in the close up above). To manage putting all of that together as a seamless whole would require more creative thought. Looking deep into the recesses, and back in time, I remembered using paint splatters on Cross (see below), and thought that I might make use of a similar technique (though in a very different way it turned out).

These I eventually mirrored also, but at angles to produce five or six turns, using them as masks to show other carpet styles through. The effect on this particular one turned out to produce a sort of five pointed star, but others looked very floral, or I-don't-know-what.

In the end I did manage to bring them together to produce six seamless pieces of wall art (one customer had been added in the hopes of generating more sales) made up of each mill's own carpet styles. Each calendar produced quite varied and kaleidoscopic effects, for which reason I dubbed them "Kalendoscopes."

What do you want reflected into the world?

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

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Christ Community Church, Logo

2009-04-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

This is my first logo design, and it shows in ways. But there are elements that I really like such as the three Cs interlaced like Celtic knot work. Besides, it's my first, you know?

In the largely bygone world of professional dedicated prepress houses there wasn't much opportunity for creative work; that was all settled further upstream. So when this first logo request was brought to me it was a bit outside my comfort zone. But, that was right after God came (see sidebar), and practically everything happening in every direction of my life was outside of my comfort zone; like getting hooked up with an evangelistic food ministry in a predominantly black downtown housing project, just down the road from the Federal Penitentiary. Like the housing project, I ignored the fact that I really didn't know what I was doing and just got busy doing it.

I really don't like the font or typesetting for "Christ Community Church." My inexperience definitely showed there. The point of capitalizing "Christ" but not "community," or "church" was to emphasize the preeminence of Jesus. The meaning seemed obvious to me at the time, but now it looks amateurish, almost like a typographical error; and the capital "C" in "Christ" just doesn't fit on the compass rose. Maybe I would use a Copperplate variant now. The whole thing is a bit busy. Probably I would try to sell just the three interlocked Cs with little more.

Having a lot more Bible and Footsteps-with-God under my belt, I now seriously question the propriety of churches and para-church ministries having a bunch of little extra-biblical logos to define and separate themselves. The early Christians "turned the world upside down," and their practices were very simple: one minimalistic logo for the whole enterprise was more than sufficient. The current situation looks more like commercial competition.

What identity do you need the world to see?

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

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SNAP, GRACoL & SWOP

2009-04-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

Strangely, here is a subject that I actually find exciting. It is fascinating to me how well color goes through the prepress and printing process when you understand and strictly adhere to an established process such as SWOP, and how poorly it goes when you do not.

BTW, GRACoL was intended to be pronounced "grackle," as in, "SNAP, GRACoL & SWOP," like the old Rice Crispies elves.

Midtone Gain, Solid Ink Density, Gray Balance. This makes some people's eyes glaze over, but I love it. I have to say that it is entirely possible to get good results off press without any consideration or adherence to these protocols. What is not possible without understanding and adhering to these protocols is consistently getting good results. As Lt. Colonel Jeff Cooper opined, "Marksmanship is not what you did once, but what you can do can do every time, upon demand." And that is what separates a good Prepress Shop or Printer from all the rest: what you can do every time, upon demand. You might get away with sloppy proofing or pressmanship some or even most of the time, but if you aren't keeping a sharp eye on Midtone Gain, Solid Ink Density, and Gray Balance, it will bite you. Usually it will bite you at a critical time.

Take a look at this file. It is a 50 K square on a background of 50 Cyan, 40 Magenta, and 40 Yellow. (Actually, I had to convert this one to RGB for it to display on Blogger, but you can create the same thing in Photoshop to print it CMYK) It should look like one flat neutral gray patch. If you can see the difference on screen, your screen is not ideally balanced, which is not really too big of a deal. You're not going to get reliable CMYK color from your monitor anyway. If you can see the difference in your color proof or press sheet however, you have a problem. You're not printing to specs and that is going to show at an inopportune time. So many jobs will sail through seemingly without a hitch, then suddenly the pressmen can't match the proof. And it's for the biggest client. And they're going to be here to sign off on the press run. The pressmen point fingers at prepress; prepress point at the press.

So who is right? Fortunately that is a really easy question to answer: Whoever can show that their Solid Ink Densities and Midtone Dot Gain are where they are supposed to be. If neither the proof nor the press have these numbers written down, then they're probably both wrong. Inkjet proof or not, you need to be able to solidly quantify what each of these things reads, with a densitometer. LAB values and ∆E just doesn't cut it. If you're only 2.0 ∆E on a 4C halftone or an image with lots of gray in the subject, and it's casting pink , what do you add? ∆? or E? L, A, or B? You can't add any of those things. The problem is with your Solid Ink Density, or your Midtone Dotgain, or both, and ∆E doesn't address that at all.

Here's the thing though: all the not-so-critical jobs were probably wrong too, but you weren't looking at them that critically. You could've done better, you just weren't. You could have provided your customer with top shelf quality, you just didn't. Now that it means something, the slop that was in the system all along is looking really sloppy.

Conventional wisdom indicates that you cannot compare Solid Ink Densities on inkjet proofs, and you'll just have to rely on LAB readings. I don't know about other systems, but I do know you can get your SIDs where you want them with the GMG ColorProof software, because I have done it. It's not that easy, but it is possible. Other inkjet proofing solutions mostly rely on standard ICC profiles, which may not allow you to monkey with the profiles like that. If that's the case I'd use a different proofing solution.

I wish I had the capability at home to produce SWOP quality proofs. I would like to set myself up with an Epson 4880 and GMG ColorProof, but the Lord has not provided that so far.

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

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J&J / Invision, Tri-fold Brochure

2009-04-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

How do you make Floor Glue exciting? As a Graphic Designer you have to take mundane subjects and make them interesting to look at. These products are from a major commercial carpet manufacturer, are intended for use installing carpet and carpet tiles. This of course makes them items not to be overlooked, but when you're choosing carpet designs you're looking at carpet. Glue isn't what you really...well...

On this one the customer already knew they were producing a tri-fold brochure, and already had good photography; they were just looking for a good design to showcase it.

So what to do with that?

First I took my cue from the product packaging in the photos. The glossy black plastic of the buckets contrasted nicely with the broad, colored labels. It was simple and compelling. Why not drop them silhouetted onto a rich black background? That might have done very well left alone, but I felt a need to "frame" the design with something at the top and bottom. Like baseboard and crown in a room, I placed simple line borders and chose a color that would closely compliment the labels in the shots.

Looking at the proofs, someone said, "Why don't you put a gloss varnish on the silos and a matte varnish on the black background?" I only wish that could show on the screen; such a simple change, but it really makes the product pop. Well, I also wish I'd thought of it first, but at least I had the sense to agree.

Of course, depending on the printer, the client might have to pay extra for two runs of varnish on top of the four color process. In this case the printer ran a six color press anyway, and the client was a major customer of the printer, so it didn't add much at press (though it did take extra preparation in pre-press).

What mundane products do you need brought to life?

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

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Coffee Cup and Colored Pencil, Watercolor Study

2009-04-08T16:39:00.001-07:00

The truth is I really don't put enough time into traditional arts such as painting, to the consternation of my wife and kids. I used to paint and (especially) draw incessantly in my childhood and teenage years (just ask my teachers). But the worlds of pre-press and graphic design are primarily interested in Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark or InDesign, and there just isn't much call for traditional illustration. Factor in family responsibilities and it gets harder to find time for personal diversions. (That's not a bad trade though, because a wife and children are forever if they put their hope in Jesus the Messiah – see Psalm 2 – but paintings and drawings are all going in the fire, even Michelangelo, DaVinci, and Vermeer – see 2 Peter 3: 4-13 – if they even make it that far.

But as a freelance artist you need to maximize your potential usefulness, so, I thought it might be wise to post this study. I bought some watercolors some time ago and keep meaning to do more with them, but it's a lot easier to get around to something when you're getting paid to do it (hint).

I have pulled them out a few times to doodle around and make a couple of studies, of which this is one. Granted, Vermeer, DaVinci, or Michelangelo it is not, but it may just be suitable quality for your own illustration project. I like to think so.

What thoughts and imaginations do you need brought to life?

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

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Private Invitation, Independence Day 2001

2009-04-07T12:53:00.000-07:00

This is another graphic design piece that began in Illustrator with the intention of producing a flat, simple, lineart-type look, but was finished in Photoshop because I couldn't help myself adding shadows and depth and richness. Originally the red and white waving flag bars were only intended to show through the cross in the middle, but somehow I managed to see them sticking out beyond the edges and it changed the overall look. Seemed a real shame to cut them off.

Overlaying the Declaration wasn't a part of the original plan either, but something was just missing and I eventually figured out that was it. I think I actually had to locate one of those printed souvenir copies, then scanned it on a flatbed scanner. The Liberty Bell and Unite or Die was taken from Clipart books we found at Colonial Williamsburg.

Did you know that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the exact same Independence Day? (I believe it was the 50th anniversary too...) That also could be just a remarkable coincidence I suppose...but if it is, it is remarkable isn't it?

I think this is one of my better pieces and I really enjoy looking at it. The interplay of the gold Declaration over the Star-Spangled Blue field, floating over the Red & White Bars that are revealed through the Cross shaped cutout (that's a "cruciform window" for those who are keeping up) ...of course, Independence Day has always been one of my favorite holidays anyway.

What notable occasion do you have coming up?

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

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Lance M. Jackson Interiors, B&W Magazine Ad

2009-04-06T15:26:00.001-07:00

The interesting thing about black and white is that it forces you to focus on what you want to present; kind of strips away the usual richness and challenges you with its austerity. You have, somehow, to convey so-much information, without letting it get cluttered.

What's more classic than marble? What's more southern than ferns? Depending on your perspective I suppose okra might be, but not many people would think of okra as exclusive or elegant, even if it were fresh.
Besides, there wasn't any room left in the ad for "prickly."

This was a business that had a lot of hard work put into it and I really thought would take off and go somewhere...but I guess it just wasn't time yet. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

If I were doing this ad today I'd drop the font size on the bottom copy, especially the phone number, but I really like this ad. I love how clean it is, and the fern frond is so delicately compelling.

What do you want to convey about your business?

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

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Family Collage, Colonial Virginia

2009-04-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

This is our own private piece, a collage of photos from two trips we made to Virginia in 97 and 98. Most of the shots are from Colonial Williamsburg, but there are also shots from Yorktown, Jamestown, Jefferson's Montecello, and King's Mountain, North Carolina (the site of an important Revolutionary War battle that began the turning of the tide to produce victory for the American Patriots). What began as a long needed vacation turned into a life changing event of sorts, and our hearts have really been in Virginia since that first trip. God willing, the rest of us will be there too very soon!

There is far too much to say about those places and those trips for the purposes at hand, but I will turn aside to say this: The Williamsburg area is a very peculiar place. There within a few miles of one another is Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World and the beginning of Colonial America; Williamsburg, seat of the Virginia government, where many debates and decisions of import to the Patriot cause took place – including Patrick Henry's Liberty or Death Speech; and Yorktown, where a most unusual set of circumstances brought the American and French armies to a place where Washington never intended to go, to meet the French navy (with bare communication) at just the right time to trap Lord Cornwallis and force his surrender of the British Army under his command. Maybe it's sheer coincidence that the opening and the closing of the American Colonial Period occurred practically in the same place, but it certainly made me stop and think. The trip in 97 was right before God Came (see sidebar), and I tell you that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob used that trip to begin to open my eyes to His reality and His present activity in the affairs of men.

He's working all around you in your life too, just like Jesus said he is, even if you're as in-the-dark about it as I was. But that's another story for another day.

So perhaps you can see why I would start pulling together the photos of such a time and place and wind up piecing them together to make a collage. I can't recall how many layers and masks and such the PSD file had, but there are at least thirteen different photos in there that I can count offhand.

What kinds of photos do you have that might be used to make an equally beautiful Collage of your Times and Places?

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

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Campbell Printing Co., 2006 Wall Calendar

2009-04-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

The basic purpose of the calendar was to be a giveaway to customers. Past calendars before my involvement had been designed around a motorcycle theme, which apparently went over very well with some customers and had been kept. But the President of the company wanted a change in direction. He wanted a green themed calendar, as environmental consciousness was increasingly important to his customers, and he wanted it to really stand out so that they would be likely to actually hang it on the wall instead of stashing (or throwing) it away.

I thought I would take the opportunity to do something that would really be a departure from my normal work, and decided to produce a very plain and almost cartoon-like illustration in Illustrator. I pitched the idea of using a leaf of the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata), and a Red Salamander (Pseudotriton ruber) floating on a backdrop of water. The American Chestnut is a native species that once was very prolific and an important source of nuts, timber, and wildlife forage in Eastern North America, but has been almost completely wiped out by an introduced fungus. (By Dutch Elm Disease I believe: in a similar way, European grape culture was almost wiped out by a North American nematode introduced in the 18th century via a shipment of muscadine vines. To this day European grapevines have to be grown on muscadine rootstock.) Salamanders, being amphibians and sensitive to environmental changes, are considered important indicators of local ecological health. And the importance of clean water is so obvious as to need no comment. So the concept was to use a plant species, an animal species, and water; to represent the importance of human stewardship of the earth.

He liked it, and I moved forward on it.

While laying out the calendar itself, I began to wonder if there was any other way to lay out a calendar besides the standard square-type graph that is universally used. This required a little brain squeezing and a couple of night's sleep, but eventually produced the layout you see here. That precluded its use as a day planner, but again, the goal was to produce a piece of artwork the customer would want to keep and see, and keep the company's name on the wall. Day planners are a dime a dozen.

As the project went on, I found myself more and more going to Photoshop to bring the water, the salamander, and the leaf to life. So, though it began in Illustrator, most of the work was finishing out in Photoshop to get it to where it needed to be. In the end it looked great: 33" x 43", a real piece of artwork that would (hopefully) be hung on walls. The company president was admittedly hesitant about the novel layout, but loved it overall.

Unfortunately, as it was waiting to go out, other members of management (all family) took one look at the salamander and said no!

Apparently, some people don't think much of salamanders.

It was too late by that point to back up, so they wound up pulling the plug on the whole project and had no calendar that year. I learned a little lesson about how company politics interact with graphic design. It was a real disappointment, but I am still very proud of the piece.

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

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pour

2009-04-02T08:12:00.000-07:00

pour
Self Titled Independent Christian CD
(Copyrighted Material)

It's funny how as in retouching and Photoshop you think you've seen everything and nothing would surprise you. Then, "...the guys in the band wanted to know, well, if you could make it raining in the cover photo."

Later the band signed a contract with a Christian label that was supposed to re-release the CD, but one member and then another dropped out of the band. Seemed that every time they got the line-up squared away they were back to square one, and it just never did work out.

This was my first paid graphic design project, and the first time I had to coordinate with a printer without CSRs to go and handle all the details. It was actually all done in Photoshop 4: retouching, layout, type and all. It was the only program I had, so...but it printed very nicely.

Did manage to get it to rain in the cover shot though...as well as distressing the photo with stains and torn spots to add a little depth and visual interest.

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

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Cross

2009-04-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Cross
Photoshop Illustration

This is my earliest portfolio piece. Though I had been working in prepress for many years, even in high end retouching for some time, I was always too busy working to attend to a portfolio. (That's a mistake kids; collect portfolio pieces diligently!) Cross is actually the product of a slow spell in business. I started it idly and just kept going.

It was done only a couple of months before God came (see sidebar "About Fire of God Imaging"). Guess I had no idea how close I was. Funny thing though...at the time I thought of this fanciful and difficult Celtic work as being very meaningful and rich, but as the years go by, walking with God, more and more I care only for the stark simplicity of a plain cross and have no regard for the efforts of men to decorate it. No work from the hands of men could make it richer; no thought from the minds of men could make it more profound. The work of the cross is complete and perfect.

Cross was created almost entirely within Photoshop, except for some clipart celtic line drawings, and a wet wadded up napkin, with opaque slung on from a paintbrush and then dried in the microwave. (Opaque was a sort of thick watercolor paint that was formerly used in pre-press in the days of film to touch up trash in the film negatives, and such things as that.)

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

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Photo Restoration

2009-03-31T11:24:00.000-07:00

Photo Restoration
Red Diamond Promotional Photo, Seabrooke Motor Company
Family Heirloom

I really love this one. It's a promotional photo taken in the early years of the motor car for the Seabrooke Motor Company. The model shown is the "Red Diamond," named for the founder's Army unit in WWI. Apparently the company never really went anywhere, but the photo is still around.

Like a lot of things, photo restoration is something I never had time to think about when I was doing high-end retouching as a full time employee in the prepress world. We did a lot of creative photoshop work, but when you're in a given work environment you tend to get more or less the same sort of thing. Of course, there is a lot of overlap, but restoring photos requires some different tools and a little different perspective than you typically use in prepress and ad agency work. And to be honest, in that environment, a photo in the kind of condition that needs restoring was usually considered trash: something that needed to be re-shot by the photographer. But we all have photos of things that you just can't go out and re-shoot.

The Hippocratic Oath begins, "First, do no harm." This is an important ethic for a physician, and a good place to begin for any restorer. You don't want your so called restoration to actually damage the thing you are trying to restore. So you have to consider at the outset that there are limitations to what you can do. Photoshop is really good software, and a good Photoshop operator is both skilled and talented, but you can't expect a miracle. You're not going to take a faded, wrinkled, torn and scratched up old photo shot by just anyone and make it look like an Ansel Adams original.

That being said, there is a lot that can be done, and often there is image in the photo that can no longer be seen, but can still be brought out by a good retoucher. On this shot, for instance, I found that there was still the original Firestone marking on the front tire. You can see it now in the restored version if you look hard, though it is no longer visible in the original print.

It's hard to show at this size how damaged this photo actually is, but you can see a bit of it in the close up. Apparently it was rolled up and something pressed it flat at some point, breaking the image at the creases. The paper was scratched up and had numerous crackles (visible in the lighter area of the close up), and had some sort of stains around the edges, especially the top corners. The original print was also only about 11" x 8.5" (or so), but the restored version now hangs on the owner's wall at something like 30" x 24". That makes for a very impressive heirloom print, and protects the original from further UV damage.

We'd like the chance to turn your heirloom photo into an impressive print too.

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

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Campbell Printing Co., Business Mailer, Vol III.III

2009-03-30T11:26:00.000-07:00

Campbell Printing Co., Business Mailer, Vol III.III
Tri-fold, 4-color + silkscreen spot
Winner 2007 PIAG (Printing Industry Association of Georgia) Award.

This is a project I inherited. Previous editions had been designed by a local studio and lacked clear branding or identity (I later came to see this wasn't entirely the fault of the designer). The company didn't want to give up on the project, but wasn't sure the current results were worth the cost to produce and mail.

My first change was the introduction of the crimson arch with the company name reversed in Copperplate. I wanted to produce a simple, distinctive, classic look that would be used in each edition to maintain a sense of brand and to establish an impression of permanence, stability, and professionalism.

But the project itself really suffered from a lack of defined purpose. They had been in the habit of referring to it as "the company newsletter," and that was how it was presented to me – which later left me puzzled at the consistent lack of any company "news," and after several editions I learned it was not actually intended to be distributed to company employees at all. It was really a sort of hodge-podge with no clear direction.

Obviously something had to change, and after sitting down with the owner to hash through all the issues I realized that what he really wanted was a strictly commercial business flyer for established customers; something to keep the company name and image up, and to keep the customers established. He agreed we needed to make some real changes in how it was thought of, referred to, and designed.

This was the first flyer after that break, and a real difference in direction.

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

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