I work at a small newspaper. We recently upgraded from Photoshop 5.5 to CS2 as part of a major system upgrade. We were getting pretty consistent results with 5.5, but now our black-and-white photos have started coming out dark. Some look good, some are slightly dark, and others are horrible. Many are older pix (in ads) that used to print just fine before our upgrade.
The CS2 color space settings are quite different from the 5.5 color settings. I *think* I've got everything set pretty much the same, but...
Here's my workflow:
I first crop the image as needed, using the crop tool, which sets the size. Then I adjust the levels with the Levels dialog. I work in RGB, cropping each histogram to the edge in each channel. I usually adjust the midpoint to 1.25 in photos that are dark, which lightens them up a bit. If the pic is REALLY dark I'll go to all three levels and adjust the midpoint there to either 1.25 or, in extreme cases, 1.5. I may also move the black point to 20 or 30 if the pic isn't pixelating yet. Then, if the pic looks like it needs sharpening, I change to Lab color and apply an unsharp mask to the Lightness color. The pic is then converted to CMYK for color pix or RGB for B/W. The pix are then imported into Quark 7 to build the pages. These pages are PDFed and sent by ftp to our press, which is offsite. There the pages are ripped to an ImageSetter for printing.
Why RGB for B/W photos? That's so we can have 'em in color on our online edition. All of the papers owned by our company use a software program called Olive to process the PDFs into web pages.
Anybody see any flaws in that process? Is there a way to get better, more consistent results? I know a RGB pic printed as b/w will tend to come out dark, which I thought I'd compensated for. What's throwing me is the inconsistent results -- if all pix are done the same way, why are some coming out OK but others not?
_________________
-Matt Conrad
The only difference between grown men and small boys is the size and expense of their toys. |
