Can you believe...

...I'm still working on this book? (Like Weather)


(inside front cover)


It is so close to finished. In fact, it is finished, apart from the actual printing and construction. The custom colour profiling has worked well, although I have changed my choice of paper. The feedback I received from people was that they really liked the texture of the mock-up, seen here (if you enlarge). The Hahnemuhle photo rag I had chosen is a beautiful paper, but it has a soft, smooth finish. The mock-up was made with Canson 100, a double sided water-colour paper. Coating this with Inkaid, an inkjet pre-coat I mentioned in earlier posts, allows me to achieve richer colours, while keeping the texture.

The difficulty I am having now is getting the pre-coat on evenly. This is only really a problem when you print large expanses of a single colour, and is especially evident on the pages with text which are backed with navy. I really hope I can perfect my technique or I'm going to have to change papers....

As you can tell by the lack of blog posts, progress with my masters work is very slow. I just have not been well enough to really get a flow going, and according to my calculations I am about 2 weeks behind. I have not managed to get any more of my proposal written, although the self portrait in wax (seen here) is back from framing, and looks really good.


This week I "plan" (you know what my plans are like...) to get into my ceramics studio (aka the garage) and set up this installation. It should be fun to finally put all the components together as I have them visualised and see what else needs to be done. Stay tuned....

(inside back cover)

Monitor calibration

As I mentioned last post, I decided to bite the bullet and dive head first into the whole "monitor calibration/custom profile" deal in an effort to save time (and, I guess, money - in terms of paper and ink - eventually) and get on with my masters work.


I thought I'd share a little of what this has involved - minus the usual swearing that always accompanies installing any new device on a computer... The picture above shows the "Spyder" (only 3 legs tho') actually in the middle of the process. Before we got to this stage I had to turn off a lot of things - e.g. my firewall, Adobe gamma, my screensaver and some other things I couldn't find and had to ask my husband to locate for me.

Next, I followed the "wizard" to install the Spyder2Express software. That was reasonably simple, except there are a lot of very strict instructions about ambient light. This has to be constant for the duration of the test, not directly shining on your screen (i.e. no over lighting in the room, no desk lamp) and the usual lighting conditions you work under! The room I work in is on the western side of the building, but the house next door is reasonably close. This means that in the afternoons (when I do most of my work) the light changes quite radically over about and hour and a half until the sun is completely blocked by the neighbours house! Oh well! I pulled the blind (not my usual lighting conditions) and did the best I could. Finally, I could put the spyder in position on the screen, adjusted the counterweight (the round thing at the top) so it wouldn't fall off half way through and with one (or two) more clicks, it did its stuff!

In the picture above the spyder is "reading green samples". It worked its way through red and blue ones too (RGB) and then to my surprise also did grey and black. (see below) I guess my surprise shows how little I understand the process!

At the end, I could see a difference in the test image, but it didn't seem huge, which surprised me a bit considering the trouble I was having with printing my images. That meant that I was going to have to depend on the custom profile to make a big difference. Tune in for the next post to see whether I am to be disappointed or thrilled with the results....


Update 3rd AUG
After some discussion with Jeremy at Image Science, who sold me my Spyder, I realised I did not actually have the new monitor profile as created by the Spyder selected...no wonder I couldn't see much difference (is there any hope for me???) I am 'fessing up to this because I suspect I really am not the only one who has trouble with these things. After I went to Start>control panel>colour>profiles and installed the Spyder2Express, I actually did see more of a difference on the monitor...