Rangefinder Book - All B&W photos are purple :(

[T_om]

I just received my copy of the book. Indoors under flurescent lighting the B/W photos have a slight purple cast. However, the B/W photos look O.K. when viewed under natural sunlight. 🙂

Mine is purple under any light source.

I have not gotten a response from Lulu.


Here is what my email to them said:

This book is primarily a book of black and white photography. All the prints that are supposed to be black and white are instead purple with a severely reduced tonal range. They have hardly any tonal scale to speak of and look like they were not properly prepared for CMYK printing. I will be returning the book for a refund. A replacement copy would be fine provided it does not have the same problem.
Please advise. Tom O'Meara

If they do not correct the problem, I will be doing a chargeback through my credit card company.

I sincerely hope everyone else has better luck than I seem to have had.

Tom

 

[T_om]

I just received my copy of the book. Indoors under flurescent lighting the B/W photos have a slight purple cast. However, the B/W photos look O.K. when viewed under natural sunlight. 🙂

Mine is purple under any light source.

I have not gotten a response from Lulu.


Here is what my email to them said:

This book is primarily a book of black and white photography. All the prints that are supposed to be black and white are instead purple with a severely reduced tonal range. They have hardly any tonal scale to speak of and look like they were not properly prepared for CMYK printing. I will be returning the book for a refund. A replacement copy would be fine provided it does not have the same problem.
Please advise. Tom O'Meara

If they do not correct the problem, I will be doing a chargeback through my credit card company.

I sincerely hope everyone else has better luck than I seem to have had.

Tom

 

[hoot]

Must be the selenium toner. 😀

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

OK, I just got my own copy.

Brett, you did a great job. I think we should all remember that.

The purple affair: it's there. It's very noticeable in the B&W photos, and what's even weirder, it's that it's not even across the image; there's no better way for me to describe it other than it looks like the purple tint is smudged on the photo area before the black ink was applied, if that makes any sense. Like Tom pointed out, you can see it in the color pictures where there is an even space of color, such as blue sky.

The effect is less pronounced as you advance through the book; the last pictures are not affected as badly, but are nonetheless.

Now, I believe that if you were to show these to friends, they may not catch this right away --which may explain why whoever ran the printer didn't. We see it right away because, I think, we know better, imvho.

 

[Joerg]

just got mine!
definetively purple tint.......

Joerg

 

[ray_g]

I have been trying to be optimistic about this, till I got my copy today. 🙁 The first book had a magenta cast, but this is a much more pronounced purple discoloration. And while, as Gabriel said, it seems to get less as you go through the book, it affects all the black and white photos.

IMHO, the photos also look a bit "muddy" like they were scanned with a cheap scanner, with poor separation of tones.

I hope LULU is responsive to complaints, and at the very least, that they address the problem with future printings.

Too bad because the photos are very good. Perhaps we may consider making an e-book out of this? With password protected pdf download for RFF members? The photo quality certainly looked better on the preview pdf on the LULU site. That way, the contents can be better appreciated. That, and I'd hate to see LULU make a single cent more from this book.

 

[jan normandale]

I've got mine and I think it's exactly worth $40 US. Point I'm making is that perhaps the printing should be done to a higher standard. Limited run, printing like this for photography is expensive.

It might be worthwhile to explore another option and put a hold on all future orders. I'm assuming there is no proprietary rights flowing to Lulu for having the printing rights on a demand basis and we can take our materials and go elsewhere.

I think this is a real option ie low cost / low quality or optionally a higher cost/ higher quality printing. As Mike Meyers said in Coffee Talk ... "discuss"

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Mine is purple under any light source.

I have not gotten a response from Lulu.


Here is what my email to them said:

This book is primarily a book of black and white photography. All the prints that are supposed to be black and white are instead purple with a severely reduced tonal range. They have hardly any tonal scale to speak of and look like they were not properly prepared for CMYK printing. I will be returning the book for a refund. A replacement copy would be fine provided it does not have the same problem.
Please advise. Tom O'Meara

If they do not correct the problem, I will be doing a chargeback through my credit card company.

I sincerely hope everyone else has better luck than I seem to have had.

Tom

I'm with you, Tom. But I will also wait a little and see how it works out for some other people. I will not be showing this book to my friends; it is not representative of the photos. If Lulu plays the "tough shitake mushrooms" game, then that's it. I'm certainly anxious to know more from those who have the first RFF book to compare this with. I would purchase the first one, but at this point I don't know if that's worthwhile at this point in time. I'm also very very short on $$, so I can't just buy more copies to see if it was a fluke.

I can see that some of the pictures came out great (and without a purple tint), and some, like you said, Tom, the tonality is just questionable (and more purple).

Oy.

 

[peter_n]

I have the first RFF book and my copy of the second book has shipped. I'll do a comparison report when I get the second book. The European book Rangefinder Perspectives is of much better print quality than the first RFF book BTW.

 

[einolu]

I got mine and the tint isnt too noticable, what is is the lack of tonal range. Fairly bright shots look fine but shots that are over all darker, especially with night/dusk lighting look pretty bad. One of my shots was taken at dusk and is lacking all detail (Einars Odinecs, forget the page).

 

[darkkavenger]

I just keep my fingers crossed for you all and I'll wait to have more feedback before ordering.. what a luck that I got my wage a bit late.

 

[dcsang]

I got my book today... the tint is noticeable under tungsten (i.e. regular light bulbs) or fluorescent lighting. It's "barely" noticeable under sunlight - but it's still there.

The impression I'm getting is the following: Unless we painstakingly find a high quality printer that will print limited run books for low cost (which would be almost impossible to do I think) - this is what we're to "expect" (per se) - that's not to say that the outcome cannot be brought to the attention of the printer so that they can be aware of our displeasure in the quality of the printed B&W images, however the REST of the process (i.e. the cover, the binding, the shipping, the speed of delivery etc) is well done.

The prints remind me of what I used to get out of my old Epson 870 Photo printer. This is pre Epson 1280 ... so you can see that we're talking technology that's about 6 years or older.

My suggestion would be, to the folks who are doing this (i.e. LuLu) for a business, to be sure to upgrade their large scale printers to handle proper B&W OR make it well known to anyone intending to produce B&W photos that they will, inevitably, show up with SOME colour cast OR provide a standardized ICC profile that will produce, beyond a shadow of a doubt, true B&W on their printers as long as said printers can produce a true B&W print.

The REST of the book - the images, the layout, the words, the design etc. is EXTREMELY well done and we should thank those who put their time and a lot of effort into creating it. Kudos to you all 🙂

The lot of us who merely contributed photos should be pleased, at least, that we have the opportunity to take part in such a global (because it truly is GLOBAL) undertaking and that some of our images are now available for the rest of our peers to peruse at their leisure whilst away from the same computers that brought us all together in the first place 😀

Thank you to the team.
Thank you to Jorge for continuing to put up with us lot.. and especially putting up with me 😀

Cheers
Dave

 

[dcsang]

<snip>Too bad because the photos are very good. Perhaps we may consider making an e-book out of this? With password protected pdf download for RFF members? The photo quality certainly looked better on the preview pdf on the LULU site. That way, the contents can be better appreciated. That, and I'd hate to see LULU make a single cent more from this book.</snip>

That's a great idea Ray..

It may not be the same but hey.. who knows 🙂

I'm going to do some snooping in the meantime.. while this may be a stroke of bad luck for us.. I wonder if a good friend of mine could suggest anything.

Dave

 

[jan normandale]

Just a late comment.. to all the RFF'ers involved in the amassing, sorting, reviewing, collating, editing, format checking. A true thanks. I have no doubts that you did an excellent job and showed RFF at it's best.

Thanks Ray, Ralph, Joe and Brett!

 

[blakley]

"Going forward with Lulu, I wonder if it may be better to create and submit duotones. The most successfully printed Book 1 images (the ones that escaped the magenta tint) were sepia toned. Maybe creating duotones with black and some other color (not necessarily toward sepia) is the best way to force some consistency and find an acceptable middle ground. Asking these machines to hit a neutral gray may be asking too much."

Duotoning won't help; all the images in my calendar were Photoshop duotoned using my regular Pantone 4525C (taupe) duotone action; they still came out in some copies with a magenta "smear" over the left-hand side of the image, just as described above:

"It's very noticeable in the B&W photos, and what's even weirder, it's that it's not even across the image; there's no better way for me to describe it other than it looks like the purple tint is smudged on the photo area before the black ink was applied, if that makes any sense. Like Tom pointed out, you can see it in the color pictures where there is an even space of color, such as blue sky."

 

[dostacos]

well I ordered THREE, hope I can tolerate the look, two are gifts..... shipped today