www.nickhodge.com

Got bored, looked at Flickr, launched Photoshop:

From a John Nack’s post, through to a Business2.0 story.

From what I can see (but obvi­ously not exper­i­ence until it ships!) prepress people mak­ing masks (deep etches in AU magazine speak) are going to drool at this feature.

The Pho­toshop engin­eer­ing team is going to have oper­at­ors fall at their feet as gods: just like the heal­ing brush.

Ship it!

Using old tapes of the USSR Ven­era mis­sions to Venus, Don Mitchell a retired Bell Labs and Microsoft Researcher, used Pho­toshop to “clean up the images”

How long before these turn up on Google Uni­verse?

Macin­touch read­ers have repor­ted on the per­form­ance of the new Mac Pros, and spe­cific­ally how Pho­toshop CS2 per­forms under Rosetta vs. old Power Mac G5s.

Tech­nor­ati Tags:
pho­toshop, adobe, tech­no­logy, apple, macpro

Mike McHugh attempts Obscure Aus­sie InDes­ign humor on the world, and wins.

The first video-cast I watched was Mike. He’s a star with Pho­toshop — email him and ask him to post more hints retouch­ing cars for print; and also with the whole Cre­at­ive Suite.

He’s a mad keen surfer liv­ing in Vic­toria. I think that explains his sense of humour.

State of the Com­puter Book Mar­ket, Q206 details in a Tree­Map 2D graph the rise of C# and Ruby, decline of Java as languages.

In typ­ical MBA fash­ion, I am enam­ored with the graph. How do you cre­ate these style of graphs? How does the set of data need to be format­ted? The graph is an excel­lent way to show trends; growth, decline and rel­at­ive size all in one.

Which leads me to Microsoft Office 2007. The beta was avail­able a month of so ago. As a pro­fes­sional Excel jockey, Excel 2007 was the first applic­a­tion I launched. (OK, second. Out­look 2007 was first!). You know, its the little things…

The designer that re-engineered the “Named Ranges” and “Pivot­Table” UI in Excel 2007 needs a medal. Love it.

To rad­ic­ally redesign an inter­face in a set of applic­a­tions that are dir­ectly attached to know­ledge worker pro­ductiv­ity is a brave move. Pro­fes­sional Pho­toshop users keep Adobe hon­est when it comes to mak­ing life easy. Do know­ledge work­ers have a sim­ilar voice?

Now cross­ing my fin­gers for Tree­Maps in Excel 200x.

When tak­ing your piece of digital design to the prin­ted world, there is this nasty, some would say: evil, thing called CMYK. Dynamic Graph­ics magazine has a five-point art­icle on how to sur­vive in a CMYK world. http://www.dynamicgraphics.com/dgm/Article/28597

Excel­lent read, and even bet­ter: tag/bookmark it for later.

Some notes of my own, based on 8 years of ques­tions from cus­tom­ers. I’ll add to this, so you can tag it and come back.

1. In a major­ity of cases, a Print designer works in RGB or CMYK. RGB stands for Red-Green-Blue; this is ‘sub­tract­ive’ col­ors using light to gen­er­ate the col­ors you see on screen. CMYK is Cyan Magenta Yel­low and Black(K). This is a ‘addit­ive’ mech­an­ism where these inks are mixed together to gen­er­ate the col­ors we see. Light is ‘reflec­ted’ through the ink, off the paper to your eye. As these color mech­an­isms are very dif­fer­ent, the color res­ults are different.
2. The screen; LCD or CRT, will not show all the col­ours that can be prin­ted: espe­cially in the shad­ows, blues, purples and oranges. CMYK has a color space that is dif­fer­ent to mon­it­ors we view our designs. You can pur­chase devices to ensure that where col­ors can be dis­played onscreen: they match.
3. Set the background/desktop of your OS to neut­ral gray, and run the color cal­ib­ra­tion soft­ware to set your mon­itor cor­rectly. The envir­on­ment in which you eval­u­ate color; the light­ing, back­ground light­ing and the col­ors on your screen get in the way of color eval­u­ation. If you can afford it, pur­chase a screen color cal­ib­ra­tion device. If you can print a neut­ral gray with no color cast (too much CMY), you are 80% to a cal­ib­rated device.
4. Another “name” for CMYK is Pro­cess Col­ors, or just Pro­cess. Another way to think of this is “Pro­cess” equals “The nor­mal Pro­cess”. All JPEGs may not be RGB; you can have CMYK JPEGs.
5. There is a myriad of soft­ware com­pon­ents that can con­vert RGB to CMYK. These are called Color Man­age­ment “Engines”. It is a math­em­at­ical pro­cess. Adobe Pho­toshop con­verts between these col­or­spaces. So does Apple’s Col­or­sync, so does the soft­ware that sits inside a RIP or a printer driver. As each of these pieces of soft­ware are not writ­ten by the same people, your res­ults may and prob­ably will dif­fer depend­ing on the envir­on­ment. Use the soft­ware you can trust.
6. Color Pro­files, which describe the col­or­space a par­tic­u­lar image is “in” can be small, or large (up to 1Mb). Soft­ware as described above may use this Pro­file to con­vert from one col­or­space to another; some soft­ware may ignore some parts of the pro­file and the color res­ults will dif­fer. Some printer drivers just use their inbuilt soft­ware and ignore the color pro­files alto­gether. Color Man­age­ment, to work con­sist­ently, needs to use the same “color engine” con­sist­ently at all points to be 100% perfect.
7. Color Pro­files describe col­ors in RGB, CMYK or a col­or­space called “CIE L*a*b” (shortened to LAB). LAB describes color in a device inde­pend­ent (that is, not screen, not printer) using Light­ness (L), Red-Green (a) and Yellow-Blue (b). If you use a Color Man­age­ment Engine to con­vert from RGB to CMYK, the engine will pass through LAB first. Some spe­cific col­ors, or color ranges, may have spe­cial “trans­forms” as described by the color profile.
8. The CMYK col­or­space can print a wide vari­ety of col­ors. Look at a cof­fee table book; it’s is a high screen (150lpi to 175lpi) print — prin­ted in CMYK. Yes, there are other color spaces that add 2 or more plates that “mix together” extra col­ors to res­ult in a higher num­ber of prin­ted col­ors (also known as higher range col­or­space). Print­ing CMYK + spot plates is not the same. The extra 2 plates are print­ing two spe­cific col­ors. You are ask­ing the Printer to add an extra two col­ors in the print run, add extra inks. This costs money. In a large num­ber of cases, you are print­ing nor­mal CMYK. Ensure your Spots are con­ver­ted to Pro­cess (CMYK)
9. Con­vert to CMYK as late as pos­sible in your design, if you can. Keep­ing ori­gin­als in a format closest to the ori­ginal (RGB for Stock Pho­to­graphy, in the most lossless com­pres­sion, or Cam­era Raw formats such as DNG) will mean that you can con­vert to the tar­get CMYK and keep as much color in the pixels as pos­sible. RGB, based on the same com­pres­sion set­tings, will be 25% smal­ler, too.
10. There is noth­ing like a prin­ted proof from a color-matched, cal­ib­rated device. Inkjet or oth­er­wise; to ensure a match. But also note that a proofer is not the press/digital press — so your design col­ors may not exactly match. If the proofer is not yours, ask when it was last cal­ib­rated. Ask if the paper and inks being used are consistent.
11. Swatches from Pantone and oth­ers ensure that key col­ors: such as Cor­por­ate logos, match at print time. The col­ors on screen may not exactly match (see #1 above). Once you use these swatches, you are manu­ally color man­aging. Pantone swatches have an asso­ci­ated CMYK value attached to the named swatch. Rarely will you use a Pantone color for a “spot” or extra plate.
12. Once you “hard code” a CMYK value, or use a com­mer­cial swatch set like Pantone — you are in con­trol of the color. Color Man­age­ment may change the col­ors later on, but gen­er­ally you are telling the Press oper­ator: I want this mix across my four plates.
13. If you work in RGB you are leav­ing other sys­tems (Col­or­Sync on MacOS X, maybe print­ing from InDes­ign) to decide how to con­vert to CMYK. If you are print­ing from Word to a con­sumer inkjet printer, the drivers are using RGB and the printer driver con­verts to CMYK (or more inks) for you. The more inform­a­tion you attach to your RGB image (source Color Pro­file for instance), the greater chance your out­put driver will suc­cess­fully print the colors.
14. Press oper­at­ors are the most highly exper­i­enced color people you will ever meet. If you are at the design end of the world, and you meet one; buy them a beer or cof­fee and have a chat. Each one will have a story about an “unprint­able job”. Given no proof, they will match the print to what our eyes will notice most: flesh tones, green grass/trees and a blue sky. The cent­ral modus operandi is to ensure that the color is believ­able in the prin­ted res­ult. Our mind is trained to recog­nise these col­ors based on our men­tal per­cep­tion of the image as a whole. If there is a prin­ted proof, they will obvi­ously match to the proof. Trust the Press operator.
15. RIPs, the devices that take your PDF or file and gen­er­ate proofs or plates, ras­ter­ize (con­vert to very, very high DPIs) images (bit­maps) and vec­tors (text, lines, boxes) through dif­fer­ent paths. Whilst there are set­tings in the RIPs to turn this off, you can­not be sure that this is the set­ting used. Be very, very care­ful if you are attempt­ing to match the color of a vec­tor object to the color in a bit­map object. RIPs may use their own Color Man­age­ment Engine; gen­er­ally this engine will be unknown to you.

Ref­er­ences and fur­ther Reading

• Color Art­icles from Color Rem­ed­ies. Greater than 6 years old, but still relevant.
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This is 100% true: How pic­tures are manip­u­lated to make more appeal­ing magazine covers.

JPEG2000 and JPF Files: What, When, and How (JPEG2000 sup­port in Pho­toshop CS2)

I am half-famous: Moonshine2: The art of Script­ing to make your own Distillery