cmyk colour separations
by Andrew Walton
Just a little extra tip you could include in your wiki page. Will need
reworking of course.
I was actually an Offset Printer for more than 20 years, computers and
photography were only hobbies. Probably where my mental issues come from
- heavy metal poisoning.
There's a big mistake that nearly all graphic designers make, especially
if they're fresh out of TAFE with a shiny new certificate in Photoshop.
Paper is only paper, if you put too much ink on it it gets soggy and
changes shape. This is really noticeable in colours such as the dark
blue for Fedora and in any darker areas of the image.
The problem is that when you do a default separation your software by
default will use all four colours to make black, even though one of
those colours is black.
This was way before I started playing with the Gimp, maybe Gimp gets it
right, I don't know. The old Quark used to do the separations correctly
but Photoshop is hopeless, what you have to do is lift all the black out
of your image as a separate layer first, and put it to one side as the
finished black layer. Then do your cmyk separation, the black layer
should be blank and the colour layers should be almost empty any where
the black was.
I was a "short run speciality" printer, someone else did the 50000
posters, I did the 300 corporate invites. If you are truly after a high
quality result use cmyk for the photos only and use "spot colours" for
the rest of the design. It's not uncommon in my trade to get a job
that's listed as "7 colours, 2 sides, + 2 varnishes and a spot varnish"
The spot varnish is a clever little trick, you give the finished print
an over all gloss varnish first, then use one of the same printing
plates from the job, usually the Cyan, and print a matt varnish over the
top. This trick can be used to attract peoples attention to an area of
the design without making it too obvious that this is what you want.
Cheers,
Andrew.
8 years, 8 months
rural lifestyle
by Andrew Walton
One of the plus sides to my eccentric life style:
I just gave a copy of that tutorial to one of my locals and was given 2
dozen fresh scallops still in the shell. They now have a serious lunch
date with some butter and some garlic. (real butter from a moo cow)
8 years, 8 months
old joke
by Andrew Walton
1st small child: "A picture tells 100 words."
2nd small child: "Isn't that meant to be 1000 words?"
1st small child: "Nah, I've only got a 2 megapixel camera."
8 years, 8 months
Names to go with the pictures if you really want them:
by Andrew Walton
First email
_mg_0120c.jpg Red Collared Lorikeet (Trichoglossus rubritorquis)
_mg_1367c.jpg Baby Red Backed Fairy Wren (Malurus melanocephalus)
_mg_4138c.jpg Blue Winged Kookaburra (Dacelo leachii)
_mg_4637c.jpg Whistling Kite (Milvus sphenurus)
_mg_5799c.jpg Green Tree Frog
_mg_7395c.jpg Lemon Bellied Fly Catcher (Microeca flavigaster)
_mg_7527c.jpg Galah (Cacatua roseicapilla)
_mg_8559c.jpg Red Tailed Black Cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus banksii)
[Gaggadju]
Second email
_mg_1291c.jpg Blue Faced Honey Eater (Entomyzon cyanotis)
_mg_3882c.jpg Rainbow Bee Eater (Merops ornatus)
_mg_6069c.jpg Some flower (with a bee)
_mg_6418c.jpg Magpie Goose (Anseranas semipalmata) [good eating on
one of them]
_mg_6464c.jpg Fig Bird (Sphecotheres viridis)
_mg_7505c.jpg Bar Shouldered Dove (Geopelia humeralis)
_mg_7534c.jpg Butterfly
_mg_7615c.jpg Sulphur Crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita)
Just a little info on the photography for anyone that's interested:
The camera was a Canon 400D, the cheap kit that came with the 75-300 mm
F5.6 lens which was used for most of these pictures. All the shots are
taken with the camera "hand held" because the stupid birds won't stay
still. All of the best shots are the opportunistic ones, not the ones
where I sat still as a stone for hours on end.
Some of the photos were taken with a Rubinar 500 mm Macro F5.6 lens that
I had made in 2009. Using that Hand Held is a challenge. The 400D camera
was before we had image stabilization so there was a bit of skill
involved, the Rubinar lens was designed in the 1930's and requires a lot
of skill even with a tripod. Beautiful lens when you get it right though.
And a tip for young players - make a folder to work from for each new
task and put copies of the pictures you want to work with in there.
Never edit your originals, that always ends in tears.
If you use a Canon camera and Linux you'll soon notice that Canon have
created their own unique format for RAW images. Most programs will tell
you that the image is 48 bits per pixel, technology we don't have yet.
Their RAW files are actually 4 layers @ 12 bits per pixel, Red Blue
Green and Transparency. This causes problems when you convert from raw
to jpg. So I use an old stand alone WinXP system to run the Canon
software and do the initial conversion, then back to Linux and the
latest version of Gimp to edit using GreyCstoration for the noise removal.
8 years, 8 months
definitions of "rural"
by Andrew Walton
Just to give you an idea of my interpretation of the word "rural". This
is a picture of the first house I lived in at Dundee, I lived there for
nearly 2 years. The floor was just old offcuts of linoleum and old bits
of tarpaulin thrown over the top of the black mud. No water or
electricity, during the dry season I'd get water from a spring down the
back of the block, about a kilometre away.
I was given a couple of old half dead solar panels, this meant I could
run that little Dell laptop for about 6 hours a day if I was just
reading a book, but only for about 2 hours if I was editing photos. I
had no car, if I felt like socialising I'd walk 13 kilometres to the
pub. My nearest neighbour was 3 kilometres away.
And Australia does something a little bit different to most other
countries, we don't have unemployment insurance, we have a government
sponsored unemployment plan and I get paid "the dole" out of tax payer's
money. It's not a lot, enough to buy some food and a few simples, but it
has a massive impact on crime rates during periods of high unemployment.
And when you live in the bush there is nowhere to spend that money, if
you don't hunt you starve, so eventually there's enough money sitting
there to buy a computer, or another lens.
Cheers,
Andrew.
8 years, 8 months
Suitable images
by Andrew Walton
Just a little statistic for you:
30 000 images in my collection
300 of those images are of commercial quality
Less than 30 of them make suitable desktop backgrounds
8 years, 8 months
Re: [Design-team] F23 Wallpaper.
by Samuel
Hi Máirín,
well, I really prefer nr. 6 too; by less dense you mean fewer or more
evenly distributed on the surface?
The problem here is that the sparkles also generate the pattern in the
background, so fewer spots mean a darker bg. I'm not sure there is a way
to export the sparkles and the background separately, but I'll try that
later.
S_
Il giorno mar, 23/06/2015 alle 07.53 -0400, Máirín Duffy ha scritto:
> Hey Sam!
>
> On 06/21/2015 01:10 PM, Samuel wrote:
> > Hey people!
> >
> > Here are the results of further iterating on the concept discussed on
> > Tuesday.
> >
> > https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/100882866/Sharing/f23_wp_wip.zip
> >
> > IMHO, the right direction is in the even ones, 6-8-10. Let me know what
> > do you think! :-)
>
> I think I like test6 the best, but maybe less dense sparkles? Is it easy
> enough to remove the sparkles and maybe we can play with different
> sparkle configs in Gimp layered on top?
>
> ~m
8 years, 8 months
Apologies
by Andrew Walton
Sorry if you got any of those twice. My internet access very poor today.
8 years, 8 months
