filmscanners: Re: Repro house skirmishing (long)

[Roger Smith <rsmith@unb.ca>]

At 2:48 PM +0000 3/24/01, Tony Sleep wrote:
>However I end up with a digital image. That is when the trouble 
>starts, because
>although the client(s) can cope, and the designers can cope, the goddam repro
>houses are stuck in 1985 and have no intention of changing to accomodate
>photographer-supplied scans which will rob them of their bread and butter.
>
>This last week I have had 2 separate disasters because of this.

        Ouch, Tony, thanks for this glimpse into the slimy underbelly 
of repro house intransigence.
        I was particularly touched to hear of your disasters because 
last summer you helped me out of a potentially similar situation. You 
may not remember, but at the time I asked you about submitting 
digital files of negatives I had scanned for a friend's book on 
gardening (negatives she had taken on an indifferent 35mm mini-camera 
using about 6 kinds of film. My first scanning nightmare!). The 
publisher seemed to want CMYK files, but you (and others) said RGB 
files were a safer bet. In fact, I think you said send RGB files 
tagged with ColorMatch and start praying. It (the praying!) must have 
worked, because when the book came out last November, the colour 
photos looked remarkably similar to how they looked on my monitor. If 
only they had been good photographs to begin with....

        Incidentally, I have had good results printing scientific 
photographs (plates for publication) on an Epson 1270 using the Epson 
Premium Glossy Photo Paper. That's the paper infamous for 
ozone-induced orange shifting, but I placed the prints in plastic 
sleeves and that seemed to keep the colours intact long enough for 
them to be reproduced. (Epson has since released an "improved" 
version that is more stable). The random dithering used by the Epson 
printers doesn't seem to interact with halftone screens, but someone 
else may have further info on that.

        Thanks again for the advice and I hope your future projects 
go better. It's hell being on the cutting edge <g>.

Regards,
Roger Smith