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I had the great pleasure of attending Charlie Cramer's Fine Art Printing Class this past weekend, held at The Picture Element here in Santa Clara, California. It's an intensive three day class running from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm Friday and Saturday and 9:00 to 5:00 on Sunday. That's 32 total hours of time talking about printing, looking at prints, making prints of your work, and having your prints reviewed by classmates. It's an intensive session to say the least and with only eight students, getting the attention of Charlie or his assistant isn't a problem at all.
The first half of the class is mostly lecture, as you follow along on your own computer with what Charlie does on the projector. We covered a lot of good Photoshop techniques for enhancing images and making them more pleasing to the eye. By Saturday afternoon we switched to working on our own images, making test prints as we went, trying to get the most out of each image. As the images became more refined we made larger prints, all the way up to 36" x 24". (Or even larger for wide panoramic shots) I worked on about 12 images which is probably more than most people did, and I ended up with about 10 nice 11 x 14 images, a few 24 x 20 images, and a large 48 x 20 panorama. It's safe to say that I got a lot of prints.
The main part of the class revolves around his "master file" idea and the "print, evaluate, refine, reprint" workflow. There were a lot of Photoshop techniques to help an image's contrast, color balance, etc. that were discussed and I ended up much more comfortable with Photoshop CS4 than I had been before. (A lot of the Photoshop interface changed with CS4 and the repition of doing all the exercises in Charlie's book really helped it become second nature.)
If you're interested in the print as the final destination for your photography and you feel like something's lacking in your prints, then I would recommend this class whole-heartedly. It's biased toward nature photography but the concepts carry over to any sort of photography. I happened to get lucky and find this class being offered so close to home but he also offers it in Yosemite Valley, combined with a couple days of shooting.
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I've written about Blurb before and my experiences printing my Yellowstone book. My largest complaint was that their BookSmart software really stifled photographers who want to do custom layouts because it didn't allow you to import things from other programs and pass them on to the HP Indigo presses at full resolution. They insisted on 300 dpi JPG or PNG files which suffer from some compression and text especially looked a little soft. Also, there didn't seem to be any word about color profiling that I could find.
Judging by the Blurb support forums, lots of people were begging for the ability to upload PDFs and today Blurb finally delivered with a feature called PDF to Book which lets you export PDFs from design programs like Adobe InDesign and upload them directly to Blurb without going through the BookSmart software. Presumably they'll raster these PDFs at a high resolution which will look better than the results of the weird process we had to go through before.
They also have some pre-made page templates for InDesign, as well as color profiles available. This is cool enough that it's going to get me back on track to work on version 2.0 of my Yellowstone book.
I wrote also about MagCloud a couple months ago - a company that does for magazines what Blurb does for books, which uses the same printers and even has some of the same people working on it. They support PDF uploads and I was wondering how long it would take for Blurb to come around.
This is really a great step forward! I look forward to doing another book with them to see how well it all works.
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I've never shot a roll of Kodachrome in my life - In fact, the closest I've gotten to Kodachrome is loving the Paul Simon song. But I still have a lot of respect for how groundbreaking Kodachrome has been over it's 74 year life. The numbers person in me is sad they didn't press on for just one more year so they could say that it was around for an even 75 years.
Anybody want to take bets on how long Canon's CR2 file format will be around???
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