to the Lulu book creators...

[xcapekey]

Hey..you guys have inspired me to put a book together of my own work...I shoot mostly BW and would like to have the images printed on glossy pages. I have a few questions...

For it to be printed on glossy pages it has to be printed as a color book?

What's the best way to get good BW images on print? I'll be scanning the negs on my dualscan iv. Should I save the images as desaturated CMYK files? or will Grayscale files work better to eliminate colorcast?

Should I prep the images to appear lighter/darker or contrastier/less contrasty than what I see on my screen (apple PB 12)?

Can I print the book so it is landscape oriented?

thanks for all your help...please email me if you don't feel like going in length here on the forum

russ (at) xcapekey (dot) com

Russ

 

[GeneW]

Russ, I don't have all the answers but I can take a stab at some of this.

The pages are not really what I'd call glossy -- to me they look kinda semi-matte (would others agree?)

Our collective research indicated that printing in Col is better even for B&W and with the exception of a very slight col cast towards magenta, the images came out looking pretty decent.

Lulu suggests the images be RGB not CMYK and that they be 300dpi. The contributors adjusted the images based on their individual monitors and all the images came out well. I worked with a couple of the contributors to get a bit more contrast in their images, but on the whole what you see in the book is what was submitted.

Nothing that I know of will eliminate the slight col cast except for toning your images towards sepia. The warm-toned images looked great.

Check with Lulu about landscape-printed material. It was not an option when we started but I think I read they were considering creating books bound on the short edge. I don't know if it's offered yet.

The Help files at Lulu are pretty thorough and there is a user forum on the site as well. You could ask some questions there and get answers from folks who have created several Lulu books.

Gene

 

[RML]

Since a little over a week Lulu ofers landscape format books. I'm designing 2(!) 9x7 books right now. 🙂

 

[GeneW]

Excellent news, Remy, and we're looking forward to seeing your books. Post an ordering link to them when they're published!

Gene

 

[rover]

Russ, your images will look great in a book. If you haven't already, go to our lulu page and have a look at the PDF preview of our book. The sepia images in the preview are RML's (we picked the good ones for the preview😉). That will give you an idea of what we did.

 

[RML]

Excellent news, Remy, and we're looking forward to seeing your books. Post an ordering link to them when they're published!

Gene

I will, Gene.
Things could take a while, though, with my new family and all absorbing loads of time. 🙂 But I'll spam... euh... inform you guys and gals when I'm done and ready.

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