Freebie and Name that Product Contest

I have created a new product and need a name for it. Use the comments to leave me name suggestions - make sure you leave me your real name and email so I can contact you if you win! We’ll leave the contest open until October 15, 2006. My favorite will receive one of these products for free! You can submit your own designed pages or just photos and I’ll plop them into the templates I have. You will get 16 pages total, 8 double sided 4″ x 4″ layouts. You can see a preview of some of the templates I have on my website, http://photobookmemories.com/themes.html click on 4×4 Mini Brag Pack.
Here is a photo of the product you are naming. It’s only the pages, which are 4″ x 4″ and laminated with 10mil glossy which makes them very stiff and sturdy. You can decorate your clasp yourself. The purse doesn’t come with!

I’m giving you all the purple snow mini pages as a freebie.  Here is the preview, you can download it along with the zip file:

Where are your photos?

Many people don’t give much thought to where they put their photographs. Sometimes having them in an album makes us feel better so they aren’t just thrown into an empty shoebox. Your photos may be much safer in that empty shoebox than an inexpensive photo album you bought.

There are 3 kinds of photo albums:

1. plastic pocket pages (pages with pockets for inserting the photos)
2. paper pages with or without page protectors
3. magnetic albums or self stick albums having clear cover sheets

My advice to anyone with magnetic albums is to remove your photos immediately and toss them into a shoebox! Open them up and look at the pages. If there is any yellowing at all, the glue has already started to accellerate the deterioration of your photos. This is a bad thing. A shoebox is a much safer place for them. You can buy archival photo boxes, they look like a fancy shoe box without the logo and cost about $12.

Here are some links with great info:
http://www.archives.gov/preservation/family-archives/album-types.html

http://www.archives.gov/preservation/family-archives/detaching-photos.html

http://www.archives.gov/preservation/family-archives/storing-photos.html

Color Proof Your Pages Before Printing

I’m not a color expert. I do know a little about it and it’s important that all designers know something about it when printing. Matching color in print to what’s on your monitor can be a nightmare. Many designers struggle with this. Getting an inkjet to print your colors well is time consuming and costly. Using an outside printer can be just as frustrating. Color is an ongoing issue. You don’t just learn it once and then everything works. Every single design has it’s own issues.

Color Spaces

Everything has it’s own color space. Some are custom, some are standard, some input devices create their own and apply them to your files. These include things like sRGB, Adobe 1998, CMYK, LAB, etc. Most digital cameras have some variation of sRGB. This space is meant for online graphics. R = red, G = green, B = blue. These are the colors of the old tubes in monitors. These 3 colors mix together to create the colors you see, just like in the real world you mix the 3 primaries, Red, Yellow and Blue to get all the other colors. CMYK, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, correspond with the colors of a printer. For traditional 4 color separation pre-press, you must submit your file in CMYK.

Why is this important?

Each color space is finite, meaning it can only handle so many colors. Each space is unique, meaning some colors overlap spaces and can be found in several and other colors can only exist in one. This image is of Adobe 1998 - the white, with CMYK in color. You can see the CMYK color space is much smaller and contains many less colors than Adobe 1998.

So why don’t you just design in CMYK?

You will limit your colors even further if you design in CMYK. You want to design in the richest space, Adobe 1998 to achieve the best color possible. When working with the color picker in Photoshop, the little triangle with the exclamation point means that the color is out of gamut for printing in CMYK. If you click on the triangle, it will choose the closest color that can be reproduced.

In addition to using the correct color space, I highly recommend that you calibrate your monitor with a spectrometer. I use a Spyder2, there is a new less expensive Huey (didn’t get good reviews). My monitor is calibrated and my prints match.

You can preview your pages and see what colors are out of gamut - meaning they won’t reproduce correctly in CMYK. In Photoshop, with your layout open, go to View, Proof Set-up. It’s set to Working CMYK by default. If it’s set to something else, set it Working CMYK. Then select Proof Colors. You’ll notice a color shift in your images. This is an approximation of what your layouts will look like when printed. To get a better view of what colors are shifting, select the next option, Gamut Warning. This will show you all the colors that will shift in print.
If the files I receive from customers are ready to print, meaning they are the correct pixel size and correct ppi, I simply create a PDF file to send to the printer. I don’t modify the color space. The PDFs are saved as RGB. I let the printer do the conversion to CMYK. I highly recommend you proof your pages before sending. Only a well calibrated monitor will give you a good representation of what the final output will look like. I use a digital pre-press that prints with 4 color cartridges - CMYK.

Recommended Downloads:

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/pdfs/cs2_color_workflows.pdf

http://www.adobe.com/studio/print/pdf/color_terms.pdf