Over the past several months, I have grown increasingly disturbed by the allegations against David Alan Harvey.
Because of the allegations, I have concluded I cannot continue to sell my book Fight Night with the Harvey forward included. Because of the book’s limited reach as a print-on-demand publication, I initially thought leaving it as it was would be fine. I can no longer follow that flawed logic.
David has been incredibly good to me over the past decade. He was the first to publish excerpts from Fight Night from the early stages of the project. He has given me advice and guidance. I can never adequately thank him. This was not an easy decision, but principles are only principles if one stands by them.
I will re-issue the book without the Harvey forward at some time in the near future.
For this cover of Do It Yourself magazine, I needed to move the dog into the shed, including making a new shadow. Additionally, I needed to add extra image all around to fit the magazine size and design requirements. There were also several other image alteration requests as you can see.
Photoshop work by Brian C Frank. www.bfrankphoto.com
This is part of a series I will be writing about the process of making my photography book Fight Night, from stories about photographing events to the minutiae of trying to find a publisher, to the process of self-publishing. I hope you enjoy and learn a little something for your own personal projects.
I received my first copy of my Fight Night book from Blurb in the mail last week, and nearly every page had a distinctive color shift in the greyscale images. One page would be cool and blue, while the next page would have a distinctive pink cast. As excited as I was to hold a copy of my book that was ten years in the making, my heart sank at the inconsistent print quality. What follows is moderately nerdy on my part. You’ve been warned.
For those of you unfamiliar with what Blurb is, it is a platform that allows you to self-publish a book, then order as little as one copy at a time. The benefits of this are pretty obvious-no need to spend a massive amount of upfront money and fret about selling a giant inventory. Additionally, Blurb has paired with Amazon, so books can be ordered and sent to the customer automatically. It’s a pretty slick arrangement. There are some tradeoffs though. First, the per-unit cost is much higher is you are making one book at a time. Second, because Blurb is printing a wide variety of books at once, the quality of your particular book may suffer. But I had ordered books from there before and was reasonably pleased with the results.
Using just one-color black was never an option. The lack of ink density (I said I was going to get nerdy) would make the images look really weak. Because Blurb bulk prints multiple customers’ books at once, a spot channel black wasn’t an option either. So I used RGB to make sure there was sufficient ink density while keeping everything neutral. I converted the files to CMYK using the ICC profiles from the printer. When I got the proof book back, I quickly saw I was going to have to find another solution.
To make a long story short(er)I’m pretty sure I found a solution. I converted the RGB image to CMYK, and then remove the cyan, magenta and yellow from the highlight areas. Since the margin for error for a color shift is greater in the shadows, this should keep the image neutral. It also adds a bit more contrast to the images. I created an action and included it here. Enjoy.
The next step is to upload new files to the printer and wait for a new proof book. I’ll keep you updated.
