Understanding colour Colour can be quite tricky, every device, due to how it’s designed and what components have been used, records and represents colour slightly differently. Colour representation is also very objective, most monitor and printer manufacturers all invest a lot of resources on getting their colour representation to “look nice”, moving away from a more accurate reproduction. We all prefer a nice looking image to an accurate image. Common problems when taking and printing digital photos: White balance: If your camera is unable to properly select the right “white balance profile” images come out with a yellow or orange or blue tint. You can try and choose a white balance profile in the camera’s settings yourself, or try correct the photos in Photoshop. Blow out: Print is toner dots on white paper. If there is a pure white area in an image no dots are placed, only the white paper is left, looking naked and crisp. You can fade smoothly between 100% dots and 10% dots, b...

We get books returned to us on occasion because the customer is dissatisfied with some or other aspect of the quality of the book. Often times these problems are simple misunderstandings. I'm going to try and explain some of the most simple issues in the next few blogs, starting this week with the print area. Understanding Bleed I'm sure you've noticed on your home inkjet printer that the print can't go all the way over the edge of the page. while some fancy home printers have recently added boarderless printing, the majority can't achieve this, and it's the same with our large printing presses, there is an area around the edge of the page where the printer actually grips the paper in order to move it through the press, this area can't be printed on, therefore the images of your photobook pages are printed on a larger sheet, and then cut down to size in order to achieve a neat uniform block of borderless prints that will become the pages of your book. ...