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Image Science December Message
First things first - we wish you all a happy and safe festive season, and we look forward to working with you in the new year!
Thank you very much for your support this year - you've helped to make it a very busy and rewarding year in all - it's a real privilege to work with our clients on the production of so many beautiful things.
Our Christmas Break
We're shutting from December 21st (this Friday) at 3pm sharp, and re-opening Monday January 14th. It's our first Christmas (and first real holiday) since having our first child and we really need the extra week's rest!
You can make online orders and/or send jobs in during that time but we won't fill them until we're back on the 14th. We will be back up and running very quickly after that, so feel free to get your jobs ready for then.
Your best point of contact for anything truly urgent will be email (see contact details here), as we won't be dealing with phone messages during the break.
Jeremy's Corner - The Year That Was
December has been just like every other month this year for us - frantically busy! I again haven't had much time for articles - probably no surprise to any parent or small business owner, but it seems that juggling a baby and a business is quite a challenge!
I did write one rather techy article on using ICC profiles to very effectively simulate classic alternative processes like Van Dyke brown, cyanotypes, and albumen prints. A very successful little project, if you're interested in those sorts of processes and want to more easily make those sorts of prints, you might find the article interesting.
Many of you enquire after our Leyna - she is doing really well, she's almost 6 months old and is doing all the normal baby things - lots of smiles, funny noises, rolling over, attempting to crawl, and has been sleeping through the night (to 8am!) since about 7 weeks old. She's an absolute joy!
It's been a real pleasure working with you all this year and we've achieved some great things - there's been an abundance of beautiful Image Science printed exhibitions in the galleries around town (indeed all over the country!), and in general it's good to see a very healthy print sales market. There's no question galleries and buyers have taken to the pigment inkjet (giclee) approach, and we're seeing prints of a quality never seen before from artists that have really mastered the digital way now. But just like traditional printmaking, there is always more to learn and it's important, I think, to look at lots of prints as well as create them - especially prints made by people working at the very top level - it provides a keen motivator for self improvement!
We've seen more and more people getting on board with colour management, and so many people are stunned at what is so easily achievable with good technique now. Amazing what just a few dollars on custom profiles and a decent monitor calibrator can produce from even the most humble hardware. Other industries like graphic design and technical drawing etc. seem to finally be getting the message and they're at the same point photographer's were at a few years a go - some people swearing by the old methods (Pantones etc) but plenty of people getting on board with the new technology and achieving MUCH more accurate results. It's these open minded, progressive businesses that will, much like is currently occurring in the printing industry, swallow up the industry dinosaurs who are resistant to change and simply costing themselves money and time by failing to take advantage of the benefits the new technology can bring. That said, the learning curve can be steep and the colour management companies could certainly do more to make their products accessible. Documentation remains a bit thin - which is why we put up extensive guides to things like using an Eye One Display and calibrating Eizo Screens (Flexscan or ColorEdge) (on that note, Eizo have just released ColorNavigator 5 so if you have a CG or CE monitor, I'd download that from their website - lots of good new things in there!).
We're also doing a lot more printing for illustrators and graphic designers who are quickly realising that good quality, archival reproductions of their work can make the difference between sink and swim in the difficult word of art - gone are the days where you sell your original and you never see income again from your efforts. It's very important to create a high quality, reliable digital archive of your works - fairly easy if produced digitally from the outset but trickier if your work is made with more traditional methods. But once you have your high quality digital files, there are many opportunities to reap further benefits from your existing work - many of our clients are using places like Etsy and RedBubble to carve out niche careers in art, which is great to see - the whole world can be your marketplace now, very easily, and that can make all the difference. Places like those can open up whole new markets - you no longer have to only sell your art in galleries for premium prices, but can now easily make your work accessibly for reasonable prices to a much wider audience in the form of small prints, cards, t-shirts etc you name it.
Eizo monitors continue to be a runaway success and with performance a country mile ahead of the competition it's not hard to see why. Oddly the gap between high quality LCDs and the not so good brands tends to be widening rather than getting closer together. (Apple screens continue their downward spiral - can't see how they can actually make them worse year after year but somehow they pull it off - the 24" iMac screens are truly terrible at the moment - quite amazing shift across the field that makes them very difficult to use for colour accurate work). Pretty boxes they are, but Apple (like almost everyone else) continues to focus on the consumer market and not the professional market. Why can't companies get the message that we want high performance, easy to use devices, with good documentation, and that all the bells and whistles (like Aero and Expose etc) just get in the way of actual work?
The theme for inkjet papers this year was choices choices choices - and that will only increase next year, as there are some very interesting new things coming. While Hahnemuhle had a few hiccups this year, they're back on track now (I spoke directly to Hahnemuhle's QA manager in Germany) and I expect that it will be smooth sailing again from now on (much like it was for almost all of the last 6 years). Photo Rag remains the king of the market but it's good to finally see some real competition in the form of Portfolio Rag which offers equal print quality and is a much nicer paper to frame as it flattens so easily (hence we've done several major exhibitions on this paper with great success!).
Crane Silver Rag, talked about by a few as last years news, remains to my taste the best of the gloss and semigloss fibre based darkroom alternatives overall - incredible print quality and contrast range, and I prefer the fact there's some moderate texture to it, reminds one there is a real cotton paper at the base of it. For those looking for a smoother paper, the recent Harman launch of their Baryta Alumina paper has been very exciting (we've deliberately kept a bit quiet about these beautiful new options as it's been very hard to keep stock on the shelves - they're too popular! Next year stocks should be much improved). We've also got some limited A4 stocks of Ilford's Gallerie Silk Gold fibre based - which also looks stunning (kind of inbetween the very smooth Harman and Silver Rag). We'll be adding quite a few Ilford and some more Harman papers early next year, more on those later.
Solux lights are proving very popular - again, not hard to see why as they are clearly a quality product and they're a very inexpensive way of bringing a big, visible improvement to both your workflow and print display areas. Having a light that is as near as possible to the D50 standard (around which pretty much all of colour management is based) allows the last few percent of accuracy with soft proofing to be achieved. Amazing how a good light source can really set off a print and how much better prints can look on the wall when lit by a quality light. And the better your prints look on the wall the more satisfying the whole endeavour is (and the more sales you're likely to make!).
Our 'Store And Print' reproduction service (where we store a copy of your files here and you simply email your orders through when you need some more prints) is rapidly becoming very very popular. It's a very convenient approach and as far as I'm aware we're the only people in the country that offer this service. If nothing else, you have an offsite backup of your valuable images on our server. And there's no question data loss is an increasing problem in our industry lately - let me again recommend you implement a strict back up policy, preferably one including offsite back up on high quality media like Taiyo Yuden media.
We've tired hard to grow the website into a substantial resource for digital imaging information and to really support our clients in their imaging endeavours (in the way only a small, personal business can). I think we're succeeding but as ever there is more to do - stay tuned in 2008! (With any luck I'll get to parts two and three of the Digital Fine Print notes sometime soon!).
Once again thank you sincerely for your support, and we very much look forward to working with you again in 2008.
That's it!
Cheers, hope life is treating you very well indeed, and hope to see you soon,
Jeremy and Amy Daalder
Directors,
Image Science
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