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May 22, 2008

The VioVio Vivisection

Filed under: books, workflow — Tags: SoFoBoMo, POD, viovio — ejeschke @ 1:51 am

Ok, I admit I’m starting to obsess over this. But I had to get to the bottom of it. I realized that if I was going to compare the output from the inkjet with the various SoFoBoMo POD examples I’d be receiving I’d have to do it with a little more rigor. So, forget the loupe. I made an inkjet print on my HP9180 and scanned it at 2400 dpi. I then scanned the book image also at 2400 dpi. Both the inkjet print and the book images were printed from the same file at the same size and resolution (300 ppi). Thus, I’m oversampling at around 8X. I then took a 1200×1200 crop from each and then downsampled those to 600×600. This gives a decent size image for the web, while still showing the basic structure of the print at a 50% view.

Here then are the results. [Drum roll ...] First, the HP9180 print:

Then, the VioVio print:

I mean, it’s night and day. I’ll grant you that at this magnification it’s very different from looking at the prints with the naked eye, but this really explains everything about why the VioVio images look so “rough”. And, yes, I know that I should expect better output from the inkjet.

But, my question still is: did VioVio print this correctly, according to the best resolution that their printer could do?

I would love it if someone could repeat this experiment with their SoFoBoMo book from, say, viovio, mypublisher, blurb, shared ink, etc.

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May 20, 2008

VioVio halftoning

Filed under: books, workflow — Tags: SoFoBoMo, POD, viovio — ejeschke @ 11:09 pm

VioVio halftoning, originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Key: R20080520-225624-levels

In the comments to my post on the VioVio experience, part deux, Martin Doonan made a couple comments that got me thinking about why the images in the VioVio printed book seem poor. I said I’d try to post a shot of what I was seeing through a loupe.

Here it is. Even though it’s a pretty hurried poor macro shot in bad light through a cheap loupe, you can basically see the VioVio printer halftoning pattern very clearly. And I will note that there is absolutely no color to be seen anywhere. This yields a very neutral print. No, color is not really the issue here, methinks, but rather the apparent resolution of the printer screen (in LPI). It appears to be rather coarse, frankly. At least compared to my inkjet prints. Tomorrow I’ll print out a copy of the image on my HP9180 and take the same picture through the loupe so we can compare. Here is the original. BTW, the images were prepped in the document for 300 DPI, as their instructions suggested.

Back to the color issue, I’m still left wondering why they printed it in black and white when their web site said that books with images should be printed in color. I did check the color box. I know that this may produce unwanted color casts, but isn’t it also that case that sometimes printers do a better job of B&W prints by using color dithering? Perhaps they made a mistake. Time to see what their customer service is like.

I’ll keep you posted.

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May 17, 2008

The VioVio experience: Part 2

Filed under: books, photos, workflow — Tags: SoFoBoMo, POD, viovio — ejeschke @ 1:30 am

Rites of Passage (softcover, VioVio), originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Key: R20080516-195555-levels

I was surprised and pleased to find a package waiting for me after work today. It was my SoFoMoBo book. More precisely, it was the first of several to arrive. This one was one of two that I ordered from VioVio; the other being a hardback edition.

The book arrived very speedily, considering I ordered it only a week or so ago. I certainly was not expecting it this soon. It arrived well packaged. Given what I’d read about VioVio online, my expectations were not overly high. So it was with a combination of eagerness and trepidation that I carefully opened the package and examined the product of my labors.

At first glance, it looked pretty good, with a nice glossy finish to the cover, full bleed photos front and back, nicely printed text. Indeed, the text throughout looks excellent, except for a few places where it looks like the printer had just a trace of a smudge going on one of the running headers. The book had the right amount of heft, and the paper looked decent–not too glossy.

Now to the images. I have no complaint about highlight clipping or blocked up shadows. I was expecting the sort of usual compression that one sees going from monitor to print, and this wasn’t far off from past experience. Nor do I have any beef with the rendering of B&W tones. Yes, it was clearly missing some subtle tonal transitions that I see in my own inkjet prints of the same images, but overall I was pretty fine with the tonality. There are no obvious color casts–everything seems pretty neutral. At reasonable viewing distances the sharpness seems acceptable as well. All of which leads me to believe that my image and PDF preparation was perfectly fine.

Nevertheless, in good light the images seem to have a certain roughness (or is it lack of smoothness?). It it especially evident in larger areas of similar tone. After dinner I sat down and examined the page margins closely and noticed that the paper stock does have a certain amount of speckled discoloration, much like you would see in some matte papers. Putting a loupe to the image revealed the classic halftone pattern that one expects from a printing press. The dots are a lot larger than on an ink jet print, and are pure black and white–there is no color dithering anywhere to be seen. This despite the fact that I had specifically checked the box that said color (their web site saying that anything with images should be printed in color).

Overall, my feeling is mixed. On one hand, my $15 book looks pretty good, considering some POD horror stories that I’ve heard about color casts and so forth. On the other hand, my own ink jet prints are so superior to these that these look pretty poor by comparison. Did they make a mistake? Should this have been printed using colored inks? I really don’t have the experience to say, except that I had hoped for better image quality. Of course, my family and friends thought it was great. Am I just being too picky?

The hardback was supposed to have a better quality of paper. We’ll see if that makes any difference. Meanwhile, I’m casting my eye around at other POD publishers and keeping tabs on the collective SoFoBoMo publishing feedback.

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May 9, 2008

The VioVio experience: Part 1

Filed under: POD, books, photos, tools, workflow — Tags: photo books, POD, SoFoBoMo, viovio — ejeschke @ 6:21 pm

While it is fresh in my mind, I thought I would go over some of the things I went through to get my SoFoBoMo book uploaded and ordered from VioVio.

The first couple of things I encountered I’ve already mentioned: I redid the photo resolution at 300 dpi and increased the pages by 1/4 inch (1/8″ trim all around), as required by many POD publishers. Scribus+Phatch made it very easy for both of these things. Since the photos are stored external to the Scribus document, I simply ran the selects through Phatch, selecting a 300 dpi downsample and then reopened the document and did another PDF export. No messing around with the individual images just to change resolution. Sweet! The 1/4″ expansion was a little more work. I had to redo the guides on the master pages and then manually move each image over to keep it centered properly on the page. With a few other tweaks (described below) it took maybe a couple of hours. Now that I understand about trim, I won’t be caught unawares next time.

Things got more interesting (read complicated) when I got around to trying to set the cover. VioVio offers a couple of different choices for doing the cover on the book. Option 1 is after you upload the PDF, to choose one of your pages as the front cover and another page as the back cover (doesn’t matter which ones). That sounded easiest, but their documentation (a little weak) said that the preferred way was Option 2: to upload a separate image file (not a PDF, but a sRGB bitmapped image) that would be the wraparound cover. They even helpfully provided a PNG template on their web site. After downloading the template and playing with that for a while in an image editor, I began to think that route was going to be somewhat time consuming, mostly because I’d have to size and place the images very carefully in the template and then redo the text of the cover that I already had in my PDF file.

After playing with the image template for a bit I decided to just go with option 1. The VioVio web site happily snarfed up the 40MB PDF upload (not too bad on broadband) and then took me to step 2, where I selected my pages for the front and back covers, carefully heeding the advice that the process would remove those pages from the interior of the book, and making sure that the rest of the pages fell into the right sequence.

It then generated a preview of the cover. Unfortunately, the web documentation didn’t say that any text on the cover image would be corrupted. But it was, badly–as in completely scrambled and unreadable. I have a hard time imagining what process would do that, but in the end it became clear that I would have to provide a straight image with no text for the covers. I was beginning to have a really bad feeling about updating my PDF and uploading the who shebang over again, when I noticed that they helpfully provided an option (option #3?) to upload separate, new images for front and back covers if you didn’t like the current ones…nice! A couple of clicks later I had the original images uploaded for the covers. Another bit of work to type in the title and author, select a font, text color and placement and then regenerate the cover preview. I had to iterate this process a few times to get something that looked acceptable, and in the end I was not entirely happy with the very limited choices provided for fonts and text placement, etc. Still, I was determined to press on, and get something printed.

Step 3 was fairly simple. Just set a few parameters for the title, description and URL of the book on their store. This is also the step where they generate a PDF preview of the book, which is fairly lo-res and looked terrible. Even the JPEG that they generated for the book icons are poor. It doesn’t inspire confidence in the result, I can tell you that.

But in the end, I decided that I’d seen worse interfaces, and as they go, this one wasn’t too bad. Main lessons here–if you use VioVio

All images should be 300 dpi, with the correct embedded profiles. If they are in RGB form, don’t convert to CMYK.
Make your book 1/4″ larger than the desired size, to provide room for trim (trim is generally 1/8″ per side, but can be more).
Keep text and images another 1/2″ in from that (3/4″ from any edge) to account for variability in the trimming and printing.
Prepare the covers as a separate file or files, preferably RGB images.
Don’t put text on your cover images. Do that from the web site.

Or just upload your images to Flickr and use the VioVio/Flickr option to build the book!

Their prices are low. I’ll report again on the quality of the books when they come in.

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VioVio books via Flickr

Filed under: POD, books, tools, workflow — ejeschke @ 5:25 pm

I noticed during my time on the VioVio web site the other night that they have an option to create a book via a Flickr interface. You know how you can have your photos in Flickr printed at various 3rd party sites via the web services API? Well apparently VioVio has coded up an interface to pull one of your Flickr sets over and print out a book for you. Sure would be simpler than all that Scribus work I did, albeit with a great deal of loss of control over the look of the book. Still, given that I was uploading my selects to a set on Flickr, it would have been trivial to make the book from that (and therefore probably not nearly as interesting). VioVio even generates a lo-res (crappy) PDF preview of the book!

For a quick book, I think that would be a pretty neat trick. Especially if they pull the titles and descriptions over from Flickr and write those in next to the images. I’ll definitely be checking this out. It strikes me that it’s also the perfect tool for a kid just starting out taking pictures, as my kids are. They can already hook up the camera and upload the images and print them out on the inkjet. It wouldn’t be that much more to upload to Flickr and then put a book together.

The whole process is nicely explained in a video here.

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May 8, 2008

SoFoBoMo: Book Shipped!

Filed under: POD, books, photos, workflow — Tags: SoFoBoMo, POD, viovio, photo book — ejeschke @ 11:22 pm

Contemplation at Dusk, originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Key: R20080503-180844-curves

Well, I got a 300 dpi version of the PDF uploaded to VioVio, and with some bumbling, managed to navigate through their web site to create the “product”. You can find it here:

http://www.viovio.com/ejeschke

The preview is very low res. Base price is $15.49–very affordable!

I ordered one perfect bound soft cover with “photo silk” paper ($24.66 shipped), and one case wrap hard cover edition, the latter with “pro binding” and satin paper ($51.73 shipped).

I learned some interesting things about VioVio during the process which I will save for my next post.

I await the results. Word has it that they have good customer service and speedy shipping. And even though I was extremely careful with my PDF generation and researched it up and down the web, I’m still worried that the B&W images will look terrible. Good to have low expectations; then I just might be pleasantly surprised.

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