The challenge of ambition

Recently I was thinking back to one of my favourite authors from around the time I left college, Piers Anthony (this will become relevant, promise). nothing to do with his writing (which I find a bit basic these days) or the stories (not for those of strong moral principles) but more of the pieces he used to write for the back of the books. Kind of like blog posts, or extended letters to his fans: stuff on story development, creative process, correspondence etc.

One of the things that stuck (and I would look it up if the books weren't buried in a box) was a piece he wrote about the marks of a successful author. He set them thus: moving from selling what one writes to writing what one sells (the idea of the advance on synopsis) and moving from title dominating the cover to author's name doing so (where one's name is enough to sell the book).

This came from thinking of motivations for continuing SoFoBoMo and producing many photobooks. It answered my question to self: where can a create a challenge? Two years in and I've done 6 books for SoFoBoMo (yep, I went a bit mad last year). But I can challenge myself in the following ways:

• Improving the photographic content
• Improving the layout and design
• More cohesive projects
• Creating physical books (although I've done one)
• Creating something others will buy
• Getting properly published (we've already had a SoFoBoMoer jump that hurdle)
• Creating a book as a synopsis for a bigger project
• etc etc

I'm not saying the goal is to become commercially successful (but if I sold one or two, that would be a nice boon) but it shows a line of progression, challenge that is ever present. And over time I'm sure electronic delivery will develop in ways tht will create new challenges.

There is enough scope there to keep me going for many years to come. so if you've done it before and are wondering where the challenge lies, think a little more - it's there if you look for it.

Art of books, books of art

It has been occurring to me that there are possibly conflicting goals in the creation of a book of art, namely the function of serving up the art as the subject and the nature of a well-designed book as an object of appreciation in itself. At some point, one has to yield to serving the other.

As SoFoBoMo approaches, it's a conflict playing out in my thoughts about how to design a book. Until now, I've kept mine pretty simple, directed at serving up photographs in a simple manner: the old-fashioned one to a page, white border approach. But I've been toying with the idea of putting more effort into the design of a book as part of the work itself: spreads, bleeds, multiple images on a page etc. Something that might be more engaging to a viewer. Might that detract from the photography? Or might the photography serve as content to support a wider book experience? And can some fancy graphic and typographic design further enhance that experience?

My own collection of photobooks doesn't help in this regard. They're all pretty much traditional art books - all about the pictures, not the book as product. So they're all simple. And that's good, if you're serving up a collection of art photographs. One exception is the "History of Japanese Photography" which is as much an art history book as a book of art. It has all kinds of chnages in layout, white space around text, insert images, spread, bleeds, different background colours for images. But the overall experience sometimes feels a little forced - design for the sake of it, getting in the way of viewing the pictures. But not by much, I don't feel like I want the wh0le thing as simple text pages followed by simple pages of pictures. A balance to be drawn.

Difficult stuff, this, once you're past the basic mechanics. If I get the right idea, (one of) my SoFoBoMo contribution might be rather more novel than before, something of an experiment.

Harvey Benge on editting

From a few days ago come these words of wisdom from Harvey Benge on editting for a photobook. Worth reading, especially with SoFoBoMo 2010 (Solo Photo Book Month) on the way.

Further experiments in JPEG compression

This is an expansion of the experiments on JPEG that I reported in this post. It's worth reading that before continuing here.

This time I was looking to expand the idea to the limit - just how many iterations would it take to cause the image quality to break down?

I took the same image, working with Lightroom JPEG quality 75 and continued to successively expot the full size image. At the 35th iteration I found the first artefacts - pixel blocks, about 3x3 in size, in one of the dark patches. Nothing that would show up in print. In fact, it took a while to find it at all on screen at 100%. I then continued. At 80 iterations I got bored, happy that this is well past the number of successive saves I'd ever need.

I also tried an image that had been sharpened in the first conversion from uncompressed TIFF, using Lightroom's heavy screen sharpening. After 20 iterations there was no difference, apart from the sharpening - no artefacts, halos etc. I'd expect it to go many more iterations without problem.

JPEG torture test

I also devised a torture test, creating a multi-patch image with random detail running across it. This is a graphic image better suited to GIF than JPEG. Result: noticeable degradation around the wiggly line after 10 images at quality 75, but only against pure colour (one of the white patches and the pure green bottom left). The rest was intact, including edges between patches. The file size is small, reflecting the large colour patches: 340kB for a 6MP image, much smaller than the 1.2MB for the other, 10MP image.

Torture test after 10 iterations, Lightroom quality 75
Click for 100% view

Final conclusion on using JPEG for presentation and book making: I'm sticking to lower quality levels than before, using JPEG exclusively for creating photobooks and not getting too worried about compression settings.

Experiments in JPEG compression

I wrote before about optimising jpeg compression for various output, mainly aimed at single conversion for on-screen view. Then a couple of comments on this post by Colin Jago had me thinking more about using jpeg images.

It was suggested, in reference to making photobooks, that TIFF (by inference, uncompressed images) are needed to retain image quality. I don't do that. when using Scribus I import all images as resized jpegs exported with a quality of 9 from Photoshop or 90 from Lightroom. By working with jpegs I minimise memory requirements and speed up software response. Am I losing quality in doing this?

So I've run a little experiment. I took the image above (selected for a mix of fine detail and smooth tonal areas), from its 16-bit uncopressed TIFF format and successively converted it to jpeg. that is, I converted to jpeg, took that jpeg and converted and so on. I ran 10 iterations. I tried 3 different qualities (90, 75, 50 from Lightroom), no sharpening applied in conversion. This is what I found.

The 10th quality 90 (jpeg 90-10) showed almost no discernible difference to the first jpeg (jpeg 90) which is indistinguishable from the original. That at 100% on-screen view. The one slight difference between jpeg 90-10 and jpeg 90 was slight posterization in the darkest shadows. By slight, I mean peering closely and changing my angle of view a lot. At full-screen view it is unnoticeable. It would not show in a print. Each jpeg in this series is 2.6Mb in size for a 10MP image.

jpeg 90-10 crop, click for 100%

jpeg 90 crop, click for 100%

The same story for jpeg 75-10 compared to jpeg 75. These files are 1.2MB for the same image.

For jpeg 50-10 there is definite loss of detail and a number of strange block artefacts in smooth tone areas. I had to go all the way back to jpeg 50-4 (4th in series) before it was indistinguishable from the original. The files in this series are a mere 581kB.

jpeg 50-10 crop, click for 100%. Notice the weird blocks in the smooth areas

jpeg 50 crop, click for 100%

Conclusion: it is quite feasible to use jpeg for successive output operations without losing detail. For short runs (3 or 4 successive conversions) it is feasible to use quite low quality (high compression) and not lose detail. Higher quality will support longer runs. I haven't yet run the 75 and 90 series to the point that they start to lose quality, that's a job for another day.

PDF: a layman's explanation

As Colin Jago points out, information on PDF formats and content is typically fairly obtuse. Heaven knows why.

Off I went to read the ISO standards to understand this stuff. When one digs in, there are some fairly simple explanations for this all. I shall try and elaborate.

PDF is now defined in a series of international standards and like all standards, they have to cover a wide range of uses and interpretations. Boiling standards to their essence is quite a skill, one which I get to practice frequently on a professional basis.

Essentially PDF breaks into 2 types - the generic document container and the specific print-ready file.

The general types of PDF (1.3, 1.4, 1.6, 1.7 etc) are wide-ranging descriptions of ways of publishing documents for various applications. Basically the standards define a very general container for a whole lot of data types. Some are application specific (e.g. PDF 1.6 is specifically for engineering data).

In their simplest use (and, I suppose, the one with which most people are familiar) they are just a way of formatting text documents in a way that they can be used across a variety of computer systems. In their most complex form they are multi-dimensional, multi-media applications with hyperlinks, cross-document linking, user input, and a variety of interaction capabilities all done in a way that a variety of computer systems can use them.

The standards lay down a whole lot of requirements on document structure and on the readers that present them to you.

In practice things get muddied by non-compliances, bad formatting and odd things getting embedded. Adobe help the user by providing Acrobat Reader with a pile of capability to try and sort the mess out so that you can use the content.

Then there are the PDF/X types. These are simplifications of the main PDF types specifically for printing and incorporating requirements for colour management data. There are basically 2 types, PDF/X-1 which is CMYK only and PDF/X-3 which also allows RGB colour spaces. The PDF/X standards pretty much says: text & pictures only, no fancy stuff, tell us the fonts & colourspace you're using.

The 2 big differences between the two types of PDF (normal and X-type) are

• PDF/X is a simple, flat file. No layers, hyperlinks, multimedia etc. Just text and graphics for printing on paper.
• PDF/X requires colour management data embedded so that the printer can print things properly.

There are a few niceties in PDF/X around font management and pre-determined output colourspaces that are best left to the pros with a direct working relationship with their printer.


How does this affect you, the humble photobook writer? In principle, not a great deal. If you're doing a basic photobook and writing a PDF file with embedded fonts, JPEG images with a colourspace and no fancy links, video etc anyway then there is essentially no difference between a PDF 1.3 and a PDF/X-3 file. In fact, there's little difference with PDF 1.4 either (which introduces transparency - if you don't know, you don't need to). Just write a regular PDF and it'll comply with the X-3 format. Or export as an X-3, which should take out any fancy stuff you (or your software) added inadvertently.

I hope that helps.

Numero deux

Streets of India photobook cover, February 2009

Just received a copy of my second Blurb book: Streets of India, a collection of street photography from my trip to India last year. This one has come out even better than the Kristiansund book, I'm really pleased with the result.

Online version here.

Streets of India

By Martin Doonan

Book Preview

Finally, my first blurb book

After the trials and tribulations of print settings etc, I've received full copies of my book "Kristiansund". I must say, the quality of the final product is very nice and the quality and tone of the images is spot on. The hard cover is especially good: quality binding, fly leaves etc.
It's now at Blurb.

Kristiansund

A coastal town in ...

By Martin Doonan

Book Preview

Photobooks categorized

I realised that I was putting together a lot of posts on photobooks, especially tips on how to do it. Thus I created a category and have gone back and labelled a whole bunch of posts. With SoFoBoMo drifting closer, maybe this will be useful to some readers out there.

Scribus and POD output

I've just received my first Blurb book, formatted in Scribus and output in jpeg for inclusion in Blurb's Booksmart software. The book is a 7" square soft back, premium paper, printed in the Netherlands.

I came across an issue that is worth mentioning for others doing POD books.

My process was this: create all the layout in Scribus to correct sizes, export all pages (including text) as high quality jpegs, import these jpegs into Booksmart using full-bleed image layout. This way I get all my layout & fonts without having to worry about Blooksmart options. Simple and hopefully effective.

What happened? I received the book pretty quickly. First inspection is that this is a quality product: it's nicely bound, the paper has a good weight to it and the black and white is truly neutral. So far, so good. But closer inspection revealed very poor printing - jaggies and aliasing on all the diagonals and details. Ugh!

I trawled the Blurb forums for evidence of similar problem, nothing doing. However, before racing off to complain at Blurb I decided to double check the input files for a comparison. It turns out this problem is entirely user generated (i.e. my fault).

The problem is this: the output jpegs from Scribus are of pretty low quality. Despite setting high quality compression and 300dpi, the base jpegs look like 100dpi (or lower) versions. Not good. I wondered what had happened, so I did a few trials.

It turns out that when exporting pages from Scribus as jpegs, it uses the preview quality as the basis for generating the output, not the base image quality. I had been using medium preview quality for program speed throughout the process of generating the layout. Thus, the jpegs that were output had very low resolution quality. On switching to full quality previews, the jpeg output is as it should be. This is entirely different behaviour to the pdf output, which always uses original image quality for output.

Needless to say, I'll be reordering but I'm pretty confident results will be very good this time around.

Lightroom for book mock-up

I've been using Lightroom a lot since I first installed it a few weeks ago. I'm finding it great for bulk file handling around my various workflows. This week I started the process of producing a second edition of my Kristiansund book that I put together for SoFoBoMo. Originally I had very few shots from which to choose and pretty much all the decent ones ended up in the book. A pretty good effort for a few hours works and relatively easy to do by hand.

Well now I've got a summer's worth of picturing and a whole lot more shots to choose from. My first rough-cut got me down to 120 plus covers and I'm aiming for 50-60. Enter Lightroom and some nice features.

Here's what I've been doing:

Key to this process has been the use of a Collection. The original files are stored in a varity of locations on my system. The Collection enables me to gather them all in one place without moving or copying the originals.

Once I created the collection, I ran a print of contact sheets to plain paper to eliminate the obvious edits - all those that are not up to the job, duplicates, subjects that don't fit etc.

Next, back to Lightroom to remove those and start ordering the rest. I can easily click & drag the images in the Collection organiser to sort into the chapters and start the basic sequencing. This helps me identify further shots that don't fit, understand the overall story I want to tell and hone in on the best.

I'm not yet done with this process but was able to get from 120 down to around 90 in under an hour, together with having all of the images grouped by chapter. Now it is a question of balancing the chapters & getting to the images that tell the story succinctly.

Using Lightroom in this way is really speeding up the whole process of mocking up the book, especially the difficult task of trimming the selection down to a manageable number of images. I can see this leading to me putting together more books in the future.

SoFoBoMo: a view on the rest

After picking a few stand-out books earlier, I then made it a mission to read each and every submission at sofobomo.org. That's a lot of photo books. This is a broad critique of the rest. At time of writing there were 57 posted books. there may be a few stragglers but unlikely.

Some caveats and notices to start:

• Don't take any criticism too personally, especially if I use yours as an example.
• I recognise the fact that these are not all polished publications.
• I'm most interested in the ideas and execution thereof, not inherent design qualities of the books. These are personal views, I'm no professional critic.
• If you want to let rip at mine, feel free.

I will say that overall I found the quality of photography to be high: technically and compositionally sound. Plus the selections put together hang together well in virtually every case (I'd struggle to think of an example off-hand). It seems to me that deciding to complete a SoFoBoMo project indicates a fairly high degree of comfort with ones own photography.

On the back of these efforts I spent some time browsing the blurb bookstore to see what else was out there and I see some parallels. A lot of POD work is pretty generic stuff - a lot of what I would call documentary landscape: views of a particular area or trip. Nothing wrong with that but they do start to seem the same after a while. A strong story or different style of presentation is needed to make such and effort worthwhile to the reader. Plenty of examples here.
Having said that, for SoFoBoMo I think this makes a pretty good subject: familiar subjects so that one can concentrate on the book bits.

I posted on pdfs for the web because I saw quite a few books that were difficult to download or read on screen but very small changes would have fixed it all, IMO.

Personally I liked the abstract approach. A bit more interesting and caused me to stop a think more. Julie O'Donnell I've mentioned but Steve Dodd's & Esther Emma Jongste's are also a good examples. That's largely a personal preference thing. I really liked the idea behind Matt Alof's but missed the captions. The cations he had on his blog really told the story, that the pictures alone don't.

A few mixed black and white and colour. It doesn't really work, especially if it's just a few B&W dispersed through the book. Glen Kaltenbrun's "Tree Portraits" is an example - the black and white images didn't add anything for me. Stick to the strong colour or go all B&W.
There are lots of ways to do monochrome: Colin Jago's subtle tones approach, the classic full tones of John Chabalko (go see his for some excellent classic black and white work) or the colour toned work of Kjell Harald Andersen. I'm not sure Eric DeBill really caught it by using B&W for spring, which is a time or colour for me.
At first I didn't think too much of Martin Frech's "Uferzonen" until I read about his unusual equipment. Re-reading, it makes a lot more sense, stylistically. I just wish I understood the German better.

What was i trying to do? With "Kristiansund", it was about getting enough shots in that I could at least produce something. Working in B&W film with a fixed focal length made style control easy. For "A place to call Home" I wanted to try a couple of aspects of design and presentation. The diptychs was a new departure for me and fitted the theme I'd though of. I then was interested in presenting the book in recognisable sections, hence the colour stripes. It was as much an exercise in design as photography for me. Does it work? You be the judge.

Advice on pdf photobooks for the web

Viewpoint, Kristiansund, April 2008
Another that didn't fit in the book

Now that SoFoBoMo is over and I've rad all the books and then some, I thought I'd offer up some commentary on the technical aspects of putting together a pdf book for the web. Having done it myself, this is advice coming from both the production and consumption ends of this.

I noticed that a lot of the books posted were huge (30MB and up) and quite a lot were difficult to read and view due to the layout, hence this post. I'm not a professional designer and don't know swathes about book design but these are some simple things that I think would improve the look of the books.

My thoughts:

1. Put cover pages on the book. It looks more professional if there is even a simple pair of covers. Makes it look like a finished product. There were a few on getting to the end I wondered where the rest was.
2. While we're on covers, put your name on it. As an author, stand up and be recognised. There were a couple with no credit on them at all. Use your real name.
3. Image size matters. Unless you are using full-bleed images (right to the edge) please put more border around images. If pictures goes too close to the edge they feel cramped. Same with text & captions. Quite a few would be losing their images in trim if actually printed. As a minimum I reckon 10% of the page width as a border each side.
4. Just because it is aimed for on-screen show, put it together like a print book. The ones that look like they are printed actually read better on-screen. This means things like larger inside margins, no spreading images across the fold, proper leader pages etc.
5. Pick fonts I can read. There are a few where the typography really gets in the way of readability. Think about size, letter spacing etc. Try a few options and run up a trial page of text.
6. Please, not slideshows nor fade effects. This works for a series of images only but we are talking about a book here. Again, it's better if the on-screen book feels like a real print book.
7. Smaller, please, please, please. The key to file size for on-screen display is less resolution, not greater compression. jpeg 25% compression gets you nothing compared to 100dpi output. If you are printing, then create a second version for the web. Output images at 90-100dpi, medium compression. For a SoFoBoMo size book (35-50 images) this should get you down around 5-6MB. Most layout software will allow you to output at different resolutions, use the options.
8. Embed the fonts and colour profile (sRGB for on screen). Ensures it looks nice and as you intended. pdf readers take care of the rest.

Another handy hint for making books

Kjell Harald of the lentic blog has another handy hint for helping put together your photobook. His idea of using low res for the mock-up process will be integrated with the process I highlighted before. Like him, once the content is sorted, I reckon the book can be mocked up in about an hour or so. That leaves plenty of time to work on the details of the design.

The book-making process - some things I've learnt

Having spent quite a lot of the weekend putting together a book from my 36 bicycles pictures I've learnt quite a few practical things that may be of use to others (especially the SoFoBoMoers). This is all to do with the mechanics of the process rather than the design aspects:

First, my mental arithmetic is as bad as ever. I'm working an 11"x8.5" landscape format with 1" border and 0.5" gutter. Image width is thus 11-2.5 = 8.5". I resized all the pictures to 9.5" wide. Next time I'll take more care and write it down.

On that border size, for this format that is probably the smallest border (i.e. largest picture) that I could go with. Each image actually ends up looking quite large on the page.

The paper mock-up I mentioned in my last post was invaluable, especially when I missed a shot from the sequence in the software. Having my desired sequence handy was useful. Next time I will also try and print the filenames for indexing.

Indexing the computer files into a dedicated folder makes life simpler. I had the order I wanted on paper but had to search around through the files to find the right one as I added them to the book design. This took far too much time and could have been quicker. I will probably run 3 versions of each for the book, with separate folders. 1 version for the online/dedicated software (such as Blurb & Bobbooks use), 1 for a low-res online pdf version (with sRGB colour space) and 1 for the high-res print pdf (with AdobeRGB). That gives me distribution possibilities and is minimal effort to generate.

As for pdf generation, I'm finding it useful to run up copies at key stages: initial layout, image sequence, final completion. This helps me with the editing and quality checking as I go along and reduces mistakes in the final output.

Composing text in a separate file then adding to the software will make it easier. Word processors are far faster at raw text generation, spell-checking and the like. That will also give me independent versions of all the book components. I find Scribus a bit clunky for this bit and it then had me confusing layout and content generation. For me, the best workflow is to create all the content then put it together & lay it all out. Content and design are 2 separate issues.

As to Scribus, I may have to write a separate post but I like it quite lot. I find it quite intuitive to work with, it doesn't get in the way of simple tasks and the interface is quite simple. All of that hides a huge amount of power but for a photobook I don't need all the power, just the ability to get at key features quickly. I find it's enabling me to do that. All that from free software. Microsoft could learn a lot about interface from these guys - I'm not constantly being hassled by the software to do things the way it thinks best, it just does what I want with minimal fuss.

SofoBoMo: the book mock-up process

The mocking-up process, February 2008

With recovery from a sprained ankle keeping me off the bike I decided to look at the photobook process. Seems like everyone is getting into the act, so I'd better.

I realised that my earlier 36 bicycles project would make an excellent basis for a trial run. After first running through a resize exercise i then printed them all off, 4 to a page, on plain paper. What you see here is the result of me "storyboarding" them on the dining table into some semblance of order. I made sure I pencilled in the number order, too, just in case I blew them everywhere. next will be pulling it all together as a pdf.

The book will be 35 bicycles as one didn't fit at all. that is something to be wary of for SoFoBoMo - making sure I have plenty enough images to collate 35 as a group.

Two mentions to finish - thanks to Colin Jago for elevating my stock on the SoFoBoMo exchange, I'm not sure i really deserve it. Also to Mark Hobson for his postings on POD photobooks (from here forwards) which takes some of the fear factor out, I think.