April Meeting Recap:

Shooting for Success

Photographers, art directors, art buyers and retouchers joined the APALA membership to make our April meeting a standing-room-only event. Nader Anvari of Eastman Kodak gave us an overview of the benefits of digital photography, the challenges it presents for graphic arts professionals, and how it affects the production process.

“Digital photography is a disruptive technology,” said Anvari. He cautioned that the relationship between photographer, specifier, and prepress and printer will change. “Communicate!” he advised, “You must communicate who is going to deliver what, in what form.”

File format is the biggest issue to be addressed when dealing with digital photography. Anvari explained that he photographer’s digital capture is a 12-bit raw file representing a full dynamic range and color gamut. Finished 8-bit JPG and TIFF files have, necessarily, less data. So which type of file should the specifier request from the photographer?

Many photographers prefer to control the conversion from raw file to finished files. The advantage to the photographer is that he controls the look of the “original” image he gives the specifier by controlling what data is left out. Some photographers prefer to go one step farther by controlling the retouching as well. Whoever performs these functions needs to be aware of the end use of the image.

The advantage to the specifier in having the photographer provide finished files has to do with convenience and file portability. Since the software for reading raw files is proprietary to each digital camera manufacturer, the specifier might not have software for viewing raw files.

What if we, the specifiers, don’t yet know how the image might be used in the future? Should the digital original be RGB? CMYK? SWOP-standard? That’s when we might want the raw file. Anvari gave a tip to those of us who crowded around him with post-meeting questions: Adobe has a $99 plug-in to import raw files. It’s called Photoshop Raw. Another way to get more raw data in a finished file is to wait for the JPG 2000 software due out next year.
Anvari left us with one basic query about our digital original: Is it printable?