A Little Blurb Update

[Doug Dolde]

Frank,

I'm not so sure about that. In their Blurb’s PDF to Book Publishing Guide under A Brief Note on Color it says

In the PDF to Book workflow, all RGB color spaces are converted to sRGB, then to CMYK at the HP Indigo print device. Therefore, all CMYK color spaces remain as is and are not con- verted. Depending on your preferred color space, you’ll want to follow these guidelines for optimal print results:

1.If your images are already sRGB, it is not necessary to convert to CMYK because the HP Indigo is preset to convert sRGB to CMYK.

2.If your images are Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, Colormatch RGB, or another RGB color space, the optimal workflow is to convert your images to the CMYK profile optimized for the HP Indigo presses that Blurb uses. This ICC pro- file – HP5000SemimatteExp05.icc – can be downloaded at blurb.com/downloads/HP5000SemimatteExp05.icc. Color conversion is best done via an imaging program, such as Adobe® Photoshop®,prior to placing your images or graphics into Adobe® InDesign® or your preferred layout tool.

This implies you can just use sRGB.

[Frank Petronio]

Yeah true. My master files are in Adobe RGB and by converting to CMYK in Photoshop you can at least soft proof images individually and make tweaks. By leaving them in sRGB and having Blurb's Indigo do the CMYK conversion you give up that control.

But I don't have a problem with the PDF workflow. It is clearly inconsistency between the pages (they are printed one page at a time, not as larger signatures, so bad individual sheets can still slip in.) As to whether it is their software or printer causing the inconsistency, i have no clue.

I complained and they probably will make good on it after I send the book back to them.

[Hugh Sakols]

I'm curious about the soft proofing.
1. Don't you need to have a profile of the paper AND the printer? OR do you just need the one profile for the indigo printer provided by Blurp?
2. Do you find that after soft proofing you need to make changes to all or most of your images to match CYMK?

[Frank Petronio]

The profile should be for the paper and the printer and the ink and all the variables, as close as reasonable. Since Blurb controls the paper selection, they only need one profile. I guess?

I didn't have a lot of deep blue skies and situations that trouble most landscape photographers so CMYK conversion was painless, only a few needed their Gamma moved to open up midtones.

[William McEwen]

Frank, have you made any $$ from your earlier Blurb book (which I bought, by the way)?

[Frank Petronio]

You bought me a Blue Moon and shot of Jamesons in a dive bar!

[Frank Petronio]

Update: Got the 160-page, premium paper "big" 8x10 book yesterday. They hit a consistent, neutral black and white through out the book and indeed the B&W looks richer than the color -- overall it looks great. The hardcover and maximum number of pages makes it nice and hefty, thick-ish and satisfying to hold.

But one page has a huge ink smudge over 30% of it, obviously they must not be looking, very frustrating as every Blurb book has had something wrong with it so far. I will complain about it but I fear that I'll have to send it back and risk getting another reprint in which something else will go wrong ;-p

The binding on this one is a bit looser but still the construction is pretty good and I like the image wrap cover. They glued the cover about 1/8 inch too high off center which looks a bit odd since my image has a film frame in it, so next time I will shrink the cover image a bit to allow a bit more "float" in case they move it around on me again.

At about $75 a pop plus shipping. I can't say it is a good deal given that you can buy a large coffee-table art book for that, but I did pack this full of images (no blank pages) and overall it looks tight and professional. Just don't expect perfection. Buy one if you like, I'll make beer money off of it and you can see a good example of Blurb's capabilities.

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/843231

I did a second book, just of personal and professional photos of Shannon, 80-pages. There are a few stalker type guys who are stupid enough to buy anything with her in it, so we decided to exploit them and jacked the price up to $123.95 so at least we could profit off them. But most of her best images are in the big book anyway, so don't waste your money on that one unless you can't control your impulses (and don't tell me about it if you do, lol).

[Frank Petronio]

But overall it ain't too bad... you can see that the premium paper isn't that thick (this book is only 8x10 inches and it gets wavy) but at least it is more opaque than the non-premium paper (less show through, it is OK to print images on both sides IMHO.)

I guess it is what it is, I'd like to see them reprint the book and get it perfect but at the same time the paper and binding are on the thin/weak side and I suspect that after 50 people thumb through it, it will look like Hell anyway ;-p

[Matus Kalisky]

Hello Frank, thank you for all the experience you share here. But it seems to me that the message is: better but still not consistent ... or?

[Frank Petronio]

Exactly.

And FWIW, it has taken five days for their Customer Support people to initially answer my quality concerns and it is still not close to being resolved.