Setting up for printing on a digital printing press

[perbjesse]

 I am starting to make a B/W photo zine that I want to print using a commercial print house. I am doing my layout in InDesign, and I want it to be printed on a high quality digital printing press like the HP Indigo. My question is how to optimally set up for this kind of printing.


1) Pictures should generally be submitted in CMYK. Given that I want the best printing range possible, what is the preferred way to do this conversion for a pure B/W picture? Clearly to get the darkest black, you want to not just generate CMYK values with the K channel set.


2) When discussing with the first print house I have been in touch with, I asked for ICC profiles for their digital printing press. I was told to just use the GRaCOL2006 profile. This seems clumsy. Do print houses not profile their individual presses/printers?


3) What else should one think about when preparing high quality BW pictures for modern booklet printing? Since this is going to cost a bunch of money, I want to make sure I do the best work on my end to get the best result.

If there is a forum more suited to questions to do with fine art book/zine print preproduction, please feel free to refer me there. Any help much appreciated.


Kind regards,
-Per

[deanwork]

You are never going to achieve high quality clean bw with ANY cmyk digital press workflow that I have ever seen. All the books I’ve seen are greenish under daylight and yellowish red under tungsten if toned warm or blue or magenta in parts of the scale if left neutral, and ugly under any fluorescent light.

The irony about the HP Indigo press is that they do have a good solution for monochrome printing which replaces the color channels with gray dilutions. But none of the online shops I know of will take the trouble to set up a printer for that purpose. Many are advertising spot white color though.

Maybe I’m outdated and someone has set up for high end bw with a digital press for books and specialized in that, since I’ve looked into all this. It sure would be great and if you hear of one please let me know !

Right now the only quality books for monochrome being done that I’ve seen are duotone,tritone, or quadtone traditional offset.

I’m not aware of a website devoted to these digital press issues but I would love to know if there is. The Blurb type cmyk monochrome books if seen as well as all the ones people are using in China for University presses, etc are truly horrible. They try to tone them warm a lot of the time and thats even worse.

John


quote author=perbjesse link=topic=131802.msg1125700#msg1125700 date=1566236201]
 I am starting to make a B/W photo zine that I want to print using a commercial print house. I am doing my layout in InDesign, and I want it to be printed on a high quality digital printing press like the HP Indigo. My question is how to optimally set up for this kind of printing.


1) Pictures should generally be submitted in CMYK. Given that I want the best printing range possible, what is the preferred way to do this conversion for a pure B/W picture? Clearly to get the darkest black, you want to not just generate CMYK values with the K channel set.


2) When discussing with the first print house I have been in touch with, I asked for ICC profiles for their digital printing press. I was told to just use the GRaCOL2006 profile. This seems clumsy. Do print houses not profile their individual presses/printers?


3) What else should one think about when preparing high quality BW pictures for modern booklet printing? Since this is going to cost a bunch of money, I want to make sure I do the best work on my end to get the best result.

If there is a forum more suited to questions to do with fine art book/zine print preproduction, please feel free to refer me there. Any help much appreciated.


Kind regards,
-Per
[/quote]

[johncustodio]

You might want to contact
http://meridianprinting.com/services/printing/
https://brilliant-graphics.com/services/
Both these places have HP Indigos and it seems they can print B&W with monochrome ink sets.

[deanwork]

Thanks John. It seems like if anyone knows if it’s being done one of these two would know.

You might want to contact
http://meridianprinting.com/services/printing/
https://brilliant-graphics.com/services/
Both these places have HP Indigos and it seems they can print B&W with monochrome ink sets.

[perbjesse]

Thanks John. You can always print BW on the indigo (or any other CMYK press) by just using the K channel. This does not give as deep blacks as using all channels, but it avoids any possibility of color casts. It would be interesting to see if any of these guys actually do something different. Do you have any pointers to some place where they discuss using more than one black ink in their flow?

You might want to contact
http://meridianprinting.com/services/printing/
https://brilliant-graphics.com/services/
Both these places have HP Indigos and it seems they can print B&W with monochrome ink sets.

[digitaldog]

I am starting to make a B/W photo zine that I want to print using a commercial print house. I am doing my layout in InDesign, and I want it to be printed on a high quality digital printing press like the HP Indigo. My question is how to optimally set up for this kind of printing.


1) Pictures should generally be submitted in CMYK. Given that I want the best printing range possible, what is the preferred way to do this conversion for a pure B/W picture? Clearly to get the darkest black, you want to not just generate CMYK values with the K channel set.


2) When discussing with the first print house I have been in touch with, I asked for ICC profiles for their digital printing press. I was told to just use the GRaCOL2006 profile. This seems clumsy. Do print houses not profile their individual presses/printers?


3) What else should one think about when preparing high quality BW pictures for modern booklet printing? Since this is going to cost a bunch of money, I want to make sure I do the best work on my end to get the best result.

If there is a forum more suited to questions to do with fine art book/zine print preproduction, please feel free to refer me there. Any help much appreciated.


Kind regards,
-Per

1. Indigo will require CMYK of some flavor.
2. Don't expect neutral CMYK output from this device! Even with the very best ICC profiles (a ton of work), you will never see neutral color across the page due to the screening algorithms from HP. There will be a range from magenta to neutral to green with a noticeable pattern (seen if you were to output a full page with say Lstar 50 over it).
3. They probably told you to use GRaCOL2006 because their front end expects some tagged CMYK and might do a conversion to the 'native' CMYK using a device link profile or similar on the Indigo front end processor.
RUN a test of ONE book! Before you spend a lot on it; you may be unhappy with the neutrality of the output even if you decide to 'tone' the images (sepia as an example).
Edit: Actual monochrome printing on the Indigo (One black ink) IS possible but will look awful for photography!

[perbjesse]

Thanks Andrew. So what are the options for printing a B/W photo zine with a run of 100 copies with good quality? I assume there are no places to do offset printing for a run that small? How do people solve this problem? I have invested a lot of time and effort into a good fine art printing flow, and I want something that is not awful for the zine.

It seems like some people do print with one ink on the indigo and have found that to work ok for photography. I am curious on your experience of it "looking awful".

Kind Regards,
-Per

1. Indigo will require CMYK of some flavor.
2. Don't expect neutral CMYK output from this device! Even with the very best ICC profiles (a ton of work), you will never see neutral color across the page due to the screening algorithms from HP. There will be a range from magenta to neutral to green with a noticeable pattern (seen if you were to output a full page with say Lstar 50 over it).
3. They probably told you to use GRaCOL2006 because their front end expects some tagged CMYK and might do a conversion to the 'native' CMYK using a device link profile or similar on the Indigo front end processor.
RUN a test of ONE book! Before you spend a lot on it; you may be unhappy with the neutrality of the output even if you decide to 'tone' the images (sepia as an example).
Edit: Actual monochrome printing on the Indigo (One black ink) IS possible but will look awful for photography!

[digitaldog]

Thanks Andrew. So what are the options for printing a B/W photo zine with a run of 100 copies with good quality?

There are no options other than direct to press using Indigo, Xeikon, Nexpress and Indigo is the best of the lot. I'm just suggesting you put your expectations in line, run a test. Maybe tone the images. The Indigo with four or more inks can produce very nice output for a 'halftone' digital press. One ink? Not so much. And I wonder how many have actually had their service provider actually print true monochrome (one ink; black) which is fine if you're doing quick and dirty repro of text, or don't mind that newspaper look (albeit at a higher linescreen).

[johncustodio]

Yes, one ink (black only) is no good. But some Indigo presses can print duotones and tritones, using black, gray, and light gray inks. Call the two sources I cited and ask them about this. From Meridian's website: "As with their offset presses, Meridian’s ability to print such lush black and white images as duo or tritones on their digital press is quite phenomenal." From Brilliant Graphics website: "These special books were printed digitally on our HP Indigo 12000, in tritones with a 4th hit of cyan to replicate the gold toned gelatin silver prints."

Also, from my experience having work printed by Mag Cloud (which is owned by Blurb), I can verify that using CMYK on these presses will not yield neutral B&W. And the image tone that you do get will vary from one print run to another.

[digitaldog]

Yes, one ink (black only) is no good. But some Indigo presses can print duotones and tritones, using black, gray, and light gray inks. Call the two sources I cited and ask them about this. From Meridian's website: "As with their offset presses, Meridian’s ability to print such lush black and white images as duo or tritones on their digital press is quite phenomenal." From Brilliant Graphics website: "These special books were printed digitally on our HP Indigo 12000, in tritones with a 4th hit of cyan to replicate the gold toned gelatin silver prints."

Also, from my experience having work printed by Mag Cloud (which is owned by Blurb), I can verify that using CMYK on these presses will not yield neutral B&W. And the image tone that you do get will vary from one print run to another.

Yeah Blurb's output kind of sucks.... I've compared their output to those from Apple printers when Apple was doing this work; no comparison.
A hit of Cyan? I'm still worried about crossover and the issue with their screening algorithms, unless in the last few years, they really overhauled them (which they promised for a LONG time).
Lastly, a test is absolutely in order and at least one page should be nothing more than a middle gray; if it looks neutral over the entire page, HP fixed those issues. But without seeing this test, I remain colored a skeptic. Any printer who's going to accept a large sum of $$ should output a few unbound test pages. A color reference image or two, and certainly a solid gray that covers the entire page (ideally the entire sheet used).

[PatCastaldo]

The Apple stuff use to be done by RR Donnelley — I know they still do similar stuff, but not sure if they do the zine-kind of thing you're looking for. But at least you know what kind of quality you'll (likely) get.

They've got an app for it in the store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/motif/id1404636482?mt=12

[digitaldog]

The Apple stuff use to be done by RR Donnelley —

I don't know what gave you that idea, but it's not the case, not with all the photo products out of Aperture and iPhoto.
I know: I spent 3+ years color managing the sites printing all Apple books and photo products with an associate, all over the world. 

[PatCastaldo]

Oh, crazy, I read an article where they claimed they were the place... it's how I found that app.

[PatCastaldo]

Here's the article I got it from:

https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/31/apple-photo-printer-rr-donnelley-new-motif-app/

[digitaldog]

Here's the article I got it from:

https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/31/apple-photo-printer-rr-donnelley-new-motif-app/

And it correctly states: Apple announced earlier this month that it would be discontinuing its photo printing service by September 30, 2018. This means that users will need to look at other third-party solutions.
So yeah, maybe that 3rd party stuff is going to them. But again, they absolutely didn't have anything to do with printing directly from the various Apple applications for books, cards, calendars etc.

This however is correct so I jumped too quickly to state they were not the provider as (CGX) indeed was:

"Donnelley has been the world’s largest commercial printer for years, and its Consolidated Graphics (CGX) division was said to be responsible for Apple’s printed products."

[digitaldog]

They've got an app for it in the store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/motif/id1404636482?mt=12

Downloading now. Gotta send some special tests out, see if indeed they are maintaining the QC Apple demanded in the past. Good to know. I'm done with Blurb out of LR; not up to snuff.

[PatCastaldo]

I'll be curious to hear what you think!

It's fascinating to know from someone who was behind-the-scenes on that.

[deanwork]

I’ve heard for years that it was possible to load the Indigo with a black and two or three grays, but that no one was commercially doing it, because “ there was no market big enough” to devote to it.
And it seemed to me at the time that that isn’t correct,  surely someone could specialize in that and have a global market, but I never found one.

 Maybe one of these guys are doing it now. But like Andrew says if they won’t send you proofs to evaluate I wouldn’t trust it. But if I were doing a project like that I’d be willing to pay for the preliminary tests if I were convinced they could do it.

It seems to me if a book publisher WAS into high-end bw on demand book publishing they would have samples to send to you before you get into testing your own material. I would also assume it would cost more than cmyk full color books.

John

Yes, one ink (black only) is no good. But some Indigo presses can print duotones and tritones, using black, gray, and light gray inks. Call the two sources I cited and ask them about this. From Meridian's website: "As with their offset presses, Meridian’s ability to print such lush black and white images as duo or tritones on their digital press is quite phenomenal." From Brilliant Graphics website: "These special books were printed digitally on our HP Indigo 12000, in tritones with a 4th hit of cyan to replicate the gold toned gelatin silver prints."

Also, from my experience having work printed by Mag Cloud (which is owned by Blurb), I can verify that using CMYK on these presses will not yield neutral B&W. And the image tone that you do get will vary from one print run to another.

[perbjesse]

I have emails out to the two printers to see if they do printing with multiple greys, but have not heard back yet.

In the meantime: Is there anyone here that has personal experience of printing like this?

[Jim Kasson]

Thanks Andrew. So what are the options for printing a B/W photo zine with a run of 100 copies with good quality? I assume there are no places to do offset printing for a run that small? How do people solve this problem? I have invested a lot of time and effort into a good fine art printing flow, and I want something that is not awful for the zine.

When I had this catalog printed, the run was a couple of hundred, as I remember. I used a local printer, and picked the inks for the offset duotone printing. It came out very well. The setup costs will be amortized over fewer copies if the run is only 100, but you might at least look into it.

I know several people who have had books offset printed in Hong Kong who had runs of about 100. I don't have any contact information, though. A disadvantage is that you can't be present to sign off on the press proofs, even if you buy an airplane ticket.

Hemlock printed a book for me once, but that run was 1000 copies, and the setup costs were a third of the per-book price even with that long a run.

Jim