By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, August 06, 2007 - 3:43:00
Contras: 1933952008

Printing photos is hard enough these days with colour management that has to be taken care of, a choice of printing technologies that dazzles even the most experienced photographer, and the risk of investing into the wrong equipment. Uwe Steinmueller and Juergen Gulbins have jointly written a guide for photographers and publishers RockyNook have released this book to the public through O’Reilly.

Steinmueller is a well-known photographer and writer on the subject, while Gulbins is more broadly interested and brings his experience in desktop publishing, digital photography to the book. The result is a reference guide for professional and serious amateur photographers who wish to print their work with knowledge and using the best possible technologies.

The book covers the basics such as what offset printing is, and why you might need to know, what inkjets do, how paper is made these days, etc. It covers a lot of ground there, and goes as far as dicussing brands and types of inkjet printers. My personal opinion about the latter is that brands, models and types don’t really belong in a book --the information in Fine Art Printing for Photographers was already outdated when I received the book for review.

The technical background, however, is extremely valuable because it makes you understand why specific print jobs go wrong and what to do to get them right. Colour management is briefly touched upon, but explained well. The book also covers the myriad of problems that you will encounter with fine art printing.

There’s a good deal of information on preparing the photos for printing, using Photoshop or another photo-editing application. Finally, the book touches upon Raster Image Processors or RIPs. This part of the book was pretty short in my opinion, and could have been more elaborate, especially given the main subject of the book. After all, fine art printing presumes the photographer or artist has complete control over the printing process, and RIPs are the only technology that make this possible.

Unfortunately, the RIPs covered are only a very few of the ones that are available on the market, and the most important ones aren’t even covered. Nevertheless, if you want to know what fine art printing involves and how to start doing it, this book will be the one you’ll consult the most.