Customer Reviews

Better Gray in Print on Demand: How to improve grayscale appearance in toner based, 600 dots per inch printing

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

At this writing there are four other reviews of this book, one giving one star, the others awarding five. Nothing in between. I can see the points of both extremes, but I don't agree with either. I give three stars because....well just because.

This book is an excellent example of the problem many see with "self published" books. The design is often poor, the editing nonexistent, and the English cringe inducing. Some of this is esthetic. Some--like the poor grammar--can be overlooked if you have patience and value the message. But some just obscures the message. I have read and re-read one paragraph at least a dozen times and I still can't figure out what the author is trying to say. Even so, there is good information in here that I was eager to learn, so I have to give it more than one star. But I had to work at extracting that information.

I can't agree with "Stunning results" and five stars, either. The author attempts to explain "How to improve grayscale appearance in toner based, 600 dots per inch printing," by doing two things. The first is to use Photoshop to prep the image with Lightning Source POD printing in mind. This is pretty much routine stuff, valuable but covered elsewhere in much less painful forms. I like Masterson's "Book Design and Production," which includes a section on grayscale image preparation plus a whole lot more. The second part of the author's process was all new to me and was fascinating to the geek within me. That is to perform the screening of the image yourself and to present the result to the printer as a bitmapped image instead of relying on the printer's raster image processor to do the job. The idea, of course, is to better optimize the screening for a particular image and to your own taste. The author describes tools and techniques to do it. Understanding the process was useful to me and added to my knowledge of how printers and RIPs work, but boy was it hard to extract.

Here's the "stunning" deal, though--the author himself admits in an update (page 53) that prescreening yielded no better results than just letting the printer's RIP do the job. "it doesn't make sense to prescreen," he says. So this book won't improve your grayscale printing unless you're doing a poor job already. Buy it only if you're interested in the geeky details, like me. Maybe someone else has published those details, with real world examples, in a more readable form. If so, tell us. I'll buy it.

I thought I knew everything I should about getting the best results from photos in print on demand. I was wrong. Martin Koch's stunning results made my jaw drop. Frankly, I'm a Photoshop Elements kind of guy myself, so some of this meaty little booklet was over my head. But if you have access to the full Photoshop and a little skill in working with it, I'm sure you'll find this booklet even more rewarding than I did.

By the way, Martin's from Germany, and English is not his native language, so you'll need to forgive the occasional error in language. This book is not about polish, it's about practical information. And believe me, it delivers.

The focus of this book is preparing illustrations, screen shots, and photographs for print-on-demand services offered by Lightning Source in the US, and Books on Demand in Germany. The author provides many side-by-side comparisons of different line screen resolutions, different sharpening effects, comparisons of lineart versus halftones, etc. The book is printed by Lightning Source in the US, so you see exactly what you'll get in your own publications if you plan to print with them. The author is German and yes there is the occasional English grammatical slip, but so what! If you are preparing a book for self-publishing with Lightning Source you owe it to yourself to get this book and see the end result of different adjustments.

Yes at one point the author mentioned he thinks current Lightning Source printing does a hard-to-beat job with producing halftones out of grayscale images--they are the largest printer in the US, but certainly not the only one, and most printers can't afford their high-end 600 dpi printers.

It sounds like Lightning Source is using better printers today than they were when the book was first published, and so the treatment of pre-screened halftone images might not make as big a difference with Lightning Source printings as it did in the past. Still, you can perform your own A/B comparisons and decide for yourself. A photographer is going to be a lot more particular about how images appear than an average consumer. Even if you decide you'll be happy with sending the publisher a grayscale image without doing your own prescreening, you'd be short-changing yourself not to perform any image sharpening before sending pictures off to print. This book also discusses image sharpening. There's also a discussion of halftone dot gain, with examples so you see in print what effect dot gain has with Lightning Source's printing. Most people interested in self-publishing have no training in such considerations. If you're inexperienced with preparing grayscale images for printing, this book provides a concise overview.

As a nice parting bonus, the author gives an example of how he made his own cover design using Adobe InDesign and the Lightning Source Spine Width Calculator. The back cover features a 10-by-10 grid of color squares. At the end of the book he lists the exact Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK) values for each of these 100 squares. This grid can help you pick your own colors for your book covers, seeing exactly what you'll get if you use Lightning Source as your printer.

I hesitated getting this book after seeing that some reviews here were negative. I'm happy I got a copy. I recommend this book to any beginning self-publisher, especially if they will be using Lightning Source or Books on Demand.

For anybody contemplating self-publishing a book, this book is a must-have. It provides concrete advice on how to get good results when printing gray content on the low-resolution (relative to offset printing) printers used by print-on-demand book printers. His primary discussion is of presenting grayscale photographs, but he also discusses computer screenshots.

Even if you don't plan to have a single graphic in your book, this book is still useful because the author explains how he produced the cover of his book and includes color swatches of 100 CMYK colors on the back cover of his book. This table will be useful to any publisher contemplating which colors to use in cover designs.

Yes, English is probably not the author's first language, and the deep, DEEP detail explaining how laser printers produce grays is perhaps a little much. But the author has clearly spent a lot of time perfecting these processes, and I appreciate his painstaking attention to detail.

This book was a great find! It offers a wealth of information that is just not available anywhere else. If I had discovered this resource sooner, it would have eliminated the need for so many proofs to get an acceptable book, and saved me a lot of time and money. Techies will be pleased at the depth of the information, but even at a basic level it is quite helpful.

As the title suggests, the author of this book MAY have figured out how to improve photo reproduction in print-on-demand books, but he does a very poor job of communicating his techniques to the reader. The book is completely lacking in organization, has not been edited or proofread, and is virtually useless. I have used Photoshop for more than a decade, and I could not follow this text. If you're a beginner looking for a step-by-step guide, this is most assuredly not it. Treat yourself to a nice lunch instead. I would have returned the book, except that I did underline a few items in a failed attempt to find something, anything, that was minimally useful. I'll give the author a few points for identifying a common problem and attempting to solve it, but before he prints one more book, on-demand or otherwise, he should hire a developmental editor and rewrite this book from scratch.