Hey Community, Sorry I did not get back sooner. My friend at LSI called my cell phone -- I was waiting for an email. Did not check my messages until today. The gist of what she said is that we can indeed do a hard cover full color book, but we would have to do so using off-set printing. And she could not give a cost estimate, because the cost would depend on how much color and the degree of difficulty for the printer in setting up the book. Off-set would probably create a much better looking book, as far as image quality goes. It is the industry standard for printing high quality books. But using off-set, each color page would require that four separate plates would have to be made to produce a color image. Blue, red, yellow, and black is the way they used to describe it, but now it is CMYK (short for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black) We could, however, use a mixture of b&w and color pages. Then we would pay less for the b&w pages that don't have color on them. Still, since we are not driven to make a huge profit off of each book, we could adjust the book price to allow for the additional printing costs.

I would also go paperback it seems to be conciderally more affordable. However it seems to have a bad habbit of falling appart. 2009/1/16 Ian Weller <ianweller(a)gmail.com&gt; > On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:47:20PM -0800, Doug Berry wrote: > > Hey Community, > > > > Sorry I did not get back sooner. My friend at > > LSI called my cell phone -- I was waiting for > > an email. Did not check my messages until today. > > > > The gist of what she said is that we can indeed > > do a hard cover full color book, but we would > > have to do so using off-set printing. > > > > And she could not give a cost estimate, because > > the cost would depend on how much color and the > > degree of difficulty for the printer in setting > > up the book. > > > > Off-set would probably create a much better > > looking book, as far as image quality goes. > > It is the industry standard for printing high > > quality books. > > > > But using off-set, each color page would > > require that four separate plates would have > > to be made to produce a color image. Blue, red, > > yellow, and black is the way they used to describe > > it, but now it is CMYK (short for cyan, magenta, > > yellow, and key (black) We could, however, use > > a mixture of b&w and color pages. Then we would pay > > less for the b&w pages that don't have color on them. > > > > Still, since we are not driven to make a > > huge profit off of each book, we could adjust > > the book price to allow for the additional > > printing costs. > > > With the current state of the economy and everything I want to make > these books as affordable as possible to the consumers. > > I think paperback with color pages is the way to go. But we can vote or > whatever on that later. > > More importantly, we need to decide the requirements for photos in the > book. Nicu, can you help us out on that? > > Also I'm getting prepared on how tos on uploading photos to the wiki, > release forms, etc. Once that's ready to roll, we'll have a process > worked out for contributing your photos and stories to the book. > > -- > Ian Weller <ianweller(a)gmail.com&gt; http://ianweller.org > GnuPG fingerprint: E51E 0517 7A92 70A2 4226 B050 87ED 7C97 EFA8 4A36 > "Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet." > ~ Douglas Adams > > -- > Fedora-marketing-list mailing list > Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list > -- Keiran Smith - Fedora Ambassador / BugZapper - <affix(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; - Free Software Foundation Associate - <keiran.smith(a)member.fsf.org&gt; -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list

The most important requirement from a technical point of view is to have the images big enough, so depending on the paper size we may want to resuest something like at least 4 or 5 Megapixels (multiply the page size in inches with 300 DPI and we get the minimum resolution needed in pixels).

We can also talk about file formats and require either RAW or JPEG with a high quality, we have to accept JPEG as not all cameras are capable of producing RAW, but a JPEG saved with a quality factor of 85 (with visible JPEG artefacts) is unacceptable, so we may go with something like at least 98.

Not sure about post-processing, like some noise reduction, sharpening or color adjustments: we'll do this ourselves for the selected images or require the submitter to to it. I feel more inclined for doing it ourselves, as it will allow contributions from more people. I don't think we can list requirements from an artistic point of view (quality, composition), as those are hard to define. This is where we will have to make the selection from the submitted pool.

Can we just ask people to place the quality settings on their camera to the highest possible?

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 10:50:15AM -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote: > Do you really want me to upload raw format from my d200? > If Nicu thinks that's a sane size given that we're planning to upload them to the wiki, then yes.

Nicu Buculei wrote: > > This is why is probably better to upload to the wiki a JPEG preview and > only if the photo is selected for the book provide the RAW original (if > available). I sketched this flowchart about how I see the process for a contributing photographer.

Those are indeed beautiful portraits, but I think we want to send a different message, using not only people faces but also saying "fedora", "freedom", "friends", etc., like those:

Hey, I've been out of touch for the last week and trying to catch up. One thing I would like to suggest is that someone, either Max or Ian W, go to the LSI web site and register us as an official client. LSI has exact standards that we will have to meet before they WILL accept our books for publication. I'm not sure if they are still the same, but the old standard (mid-2007) used to be that all images had to be 300(+) dpi TIFFs. I am unsure whether that is the current standard we would have to meet, or not. But before we start, we should know exactly what their standards are. When we register, they will send us all the specs. Then we can shoot for them from the start.