Streamline Your Invoicing with the Photography Bill Book for Production

Photography bill book for Production

books are probably my favorite way of ingesting photography they demand your attention and time and transform single images into something much greater so when Musa Michi invited me to go to Ulster in Italy to see how some of the greatest photo books in the world are printed of course I said yes so here I present me some behind the scenes of how photo books so to make a book the first thing you need is some work that is worthy to be printed and then that has to be sequenced and designed this is something that's very specific to the photographer themselves and the publisher and the designer and it's something which I'm not really gonna go into so we're just going to gloss over this and pretend that the works already been made since this is more so about the manufacturing of the book when we were at Liz Ameche they were printing a few new books from one of my favorite publishers Mac and the main book which we followed was the book of Roy by Neil drabble so miss amici uses the offset printing process which uses these giant printing presses to transfer CMYK inks to paper and it's the best way to print high volume high quality at low cost but it only does become affordable when you're printing a high-volume since the initial setup costs are very high because they're printing with offset all of the files that are in the book have to be prepared with CMYK in mind this will often have a fairly substantial impact into the how the images are rendered since they're being made up of a different variety of colors this can quite often shift how the images balance looks so it's kind of like proofing prints with a normal inkjet printer you have to go through and assign the profiles and make sure the images still look how you want them to look and then additionally the paper that you're printing on also impacts how it all looks if you're printing on a warmer paper this will make your images warmer or if you're printing in an uncoated paper this will soak up more of the blacks and leave you with a less contrasty image so all of this has to be taken in account for and at mizzou michi they had a separate kind of workspace which dealt with the conversion and preparation of images to check over either what the publisher has sent them or they can do it on the behalf of them when all the files are prepared and ready to go they print off this kind of dummy version of the book which is just low quality images printed in the correct sequence this is then signed by the publisher and becomes a contractual agreement so that if there were any mistakes and the publisher were to go oh no he printed this wrong they can go back to the dummy and see who was right because it would cost a lot to reprint the whole book again then all the fun stuff begins the first step in production is creating the plates these metal plates are later inserted into the printer press and a kind of use like a stamp with ink to transfer the images onto the paper and for each printed sheet of paper there's four different metal plates to comprise up the different colors to make the full image plates are made in this big machine which is pretty specialist and just uses chemicals to mark the plates themselves but some places also may use a laser etching to do so but the benefit of the chemicals is that you can wash off the plates and then reuse them so the plates are then loaded into the heidelburgh printing press this is an insanely large expensive machine all four plates that comprise of the different colors to make the printed image loaded at once and then the paper goes through and receives all of the different colors and the way this works is through a system of rollers there's a few rollers inside of the machine which use the plates to print the image the plate is loaded onto the top roller which is then coated with water and ink which allows the printable area of the plate to be inked and offset or transferred onto the second roller which then rolls or prints onto the paper as it passes through the press and this is where it gets the name of the offset process so each sheet of paper gets transferred through the machine it gets printed by each plate to comprise the final image a nice sheet of paper also gets printed on both sides and in the final book the sheet will become multiple pages and I think the first sheet of paper that we looked at had eight different pages per side that will make into the final book and when they're printing every sheet needs to be approved by the publisher since the colors of the presses the inks kind of fluctuate and the temperatures change vary on how the color balance will be so what they do is they warm up the Machine and run the three sheets through and then they pull one out and check the color balance and they say oh maybe it's too magenta or maybe the density is wrong then they can make tweaks based upon each individual image and run a few more until it gets exactly how they want it at which stage it gets approved and then they print the whole run for the book and this has to happen for each sheet or section of the book so if you're printing photo books you definitely need a really good eye for color the sheets of printed paper then get transferred to a different section of the factory where they get folded and then there's another machine which helps to sequence the folded pages at which point you're left with these little booklets that kind of resemble the final thing except they're a bit oversized and have some things that need to be trimmed down these little booklets will then make their way to a separate facility where they get bound together and this is normally either done by stitching them or by gluing and to make sure things are the best quality they can be this is done in a separate place to where the printing takes place and then after everything is all glued together and cut down the only thing left to do is add the hard cover which additionally takes place a separate factory and then you have a finished book it's pretty crazy to me what goes into this the level of preparation and detail that goes into making a book that's perfect is so much there's a really big difference between the high-end printers and the lower end printers there's a lot of work that goes into getting consistency and quality as high as it can be when you're printing photo books they're normally comprised of these little dots that make up the image so when you look at it under a magnifier you kind of see these dots and the difference between a high-end printer like News amici is that the dots are so closely knitted together that it gives the kind of impression that it's a really really rich and sharp image and if you look at some books which have been printed at cheaper and less high quality places you can actually see the dots without even kind of looking closely and there's so many little steps of kind of perfection which lead up to making it that high quality and it's just quite insane to me how much work goes into making these books and it's something which you never really appreciate when you just pick up the final thing normally you're just looking at the images but really there's a lot more that goes into it so I have to say a huge thanks to Musa Michi and Mac for letting us behind closed doors and getting a look at this it's been really cool to see and hopefully you've learnt something and found it interesting the whole thing's given me a greater appreciation for books and I hope it has for you too