Sorted! • 11 September 2007 • The SnowBlog
Sorted!
Phew, that was a rollercoaster few hours. The proofs came back for a certain wonderfully funny Christmas book - two weeks late due to power failures and whatnot at the printers, so no time to lose. Thankfully I am ludicrously overcautious and built an extra four weeks into the process. Who'd have thought we'd have needed it. Anyway, the proofs look good and chunky. What a fine little book it's going to be. Problem was, though, that even though they are very low res proofs, just to be used for positioning and checking layout, and not for colour matching, the oranges looked very murky. I went back to the PDF and decided - yes, too murky. No one wants murk for Christmas. It's just not festive.
So that was about three o'clock. (I forgot to say that the proofs originally got posted to the hotel over the road. I am a genius sleuth and tracked them down, no thanks to the dork at the post office who was NO HELP AT ALL when he insisted it had been delivered. "Not to me," I said. "I live here, and I do not have the parcel." "All I can tell you, madam, is that it's been delivered." "NOT TO ME," I said. "I do not have the parcel." "All I can tell you, madam, is..." "Shut up. Shut up now and tell me *where* you delivered my parcel." "I can't tell you that, madam, all I can tell you is that the parcel has been..." Click.) Since then I have had my head in a stack of books trying to figure out how to de-murk the images. You know what it's like - you eliminate everything until you're left with the most complicated possible solution. "Ok," I was thinking, "perhaps the rendering intent of the indesign document should be set to relative colorimetric to avoid gamut-clipping. And maybe I should consider exporting to EPS to avoid embedding the ICC profiles in a PDF." But as always with these things, it was an impossibly simple thing that I'd missed. I realised like an idiot that I only altered the curves of the orange pantone in the duotones dialogue box - not the black one!*
A quick action/droplet later, reopen the indesign doc to auto-update the amended links, a brief stop to feed the cats and a standard output to PDF and bob's your uncle, the new PDF is as I type uploading to the printer's FTP site.
I only tell you all this because it's kinda nice to have a seemingly impossible problem to solve when you're against the clock, and then to solve it. I also thought I'd share my patent problem solving technique - WWRD? (What would Rob do?) Get out the complicated books, that's what, and work through the problem in a logical way until the obvious jumps out at you. And voila - worked once again!
In other news: a bat or something keeps throwing itself at my window. Better switch the light off. I thought night animals were all radary? Maybe this one's broken.
*For people who don't use Photoshop day in, day out, all those solutions probably sound like gobbledygook. You'll just have to trust me when I say only a dumbo wouldn't amend the curves on both duotone colours.
Emma
Phew, that was a rollercoaster few hours. The proofs came back for a certain wonderfully funny Christmas book - two weeks late due to power failures and whatnot at the printers, so no time to lose. Thankfully I am ludicrously overcautious and built an extra four weeks into the process. Who'd have thought we'd have needed it. Anyway, the proofs look good and chunky. What a fine little book it's going to be. Problem was, though, that even though they are very low res proofs, just to be used for positioning and checking layout, and not for colour matching, the oranges looked very murky. I went back to the PDF and decided - yes, too murky. No one wants murk for Christmas. It's just not festive.
So that was about three o'clock. (I forgot to say that the proofs originally got posted to the hotel over the road. I am a genius sleuth and tracked them down, no thanks to the dork at the post office who was NO HELP AT ALL when he insisted it had been delivered. "Not to me," I said. "I live here, and I do not have the parcel." "All I can tell you, madam, is that it's been delivered." "NOT TO ME," I said. "I do not have the parcel." "All I can tell you, madam, is..." "Shut up. Shut up now and tell me *where* you delivered my parcel." "I can't tell you that, madam, all I can tell you is that the parcel has been..." Click.) Since then I have had my head in a stack of books trying to figure out how to de-murk the images. You know what it's like - you eliminate everything until you're left with the most complicated possible solution. "Ok," I was thinking, "perhaps the rendering intent of the indesign document should be set to relative colorimetric to avoid gamut-clipping. And maybe I should consider exporting to EPS to avoid embedding the ICC profiles in a PDF." But as always with these things, it was an impossibly simple thing that I'd missed. I realised like an idiot that I only altered the curves of the orange pantone in the duotones dialogue box - not the black one!*
A quick action/droplet later, reopen the indesign doc to auto-update the amended links, a brief stop to feed the cats and a standard output to PDF and bob's your uncle, the new PDF is as I type uploading to the printer's FTP site.
I only tell you all this because it's kinda nice to have a seemingly impossible problem to solve when you're against the clock, and then to solve it. I also thought I'd share my patent problem solving technique - WWRD? (What would Rob do?) Get out the complicated books, that's what, and work through the problem in a logical way until the obvious jumps out at you. And voila - worked once again!
In other news: a bat or something keeps throwing itself at my window. Better switch the light off. I thought night animals were all radary? Maybe this one's broken.
*For people who don't use Photoshop day in, day out, all those solutions probably sound like gobbledygook. You'll just have to trust me when I say only a dumbo wouldn't amend the curves on both duotone colours.