I’m on my publication quality rant again, after getting the latest Lindblad Expeditions catalog. The ubiquity of digital, without a corresponding expertise on image quality, is showing up as a deterioration in the way photographs look in print.
This is the cover photo for the primary marketing piece of a major eco-tourism cruise line. You’d think they’d want to put their best foot forward. My first take was, this is an underexposed, over-corrected and over-sharpened image. There are halos around the water drops, and the shadows are full of noise and are nearly posterized. I have seen worse from Lindblad, where they’ve run full page shots of their ship enlarged from an overcompressed, tiny jpg, and all you see are nasty artifacts. The problems with this photo are subtler, but still.
The deeper issue is that no one is minding the store for image quality anymore. It’s a rant I’ve carried on previously here. It used to be that film had to pass through a bottleneck--the pre-press process--before becoming a printing plate for reproduction. Expert hands drum-scanned a piece of film and corrected the file to fit the limitations of the CMYK printing process.
There is no expert at the helm anymore. Photographers, who may or may not know what they’re doing, hand off a file to a designer, who may or may not understand color management, who hands it off to a printer who then has to clean up the mess, if they care enough. A given piece will have multiple photographs from many sources, all worked to different standards. I don’t think I’d want to be a designer in today’s environment. We used to have a common understanding of the process required to get from film to print. Now, everyone had their own opinion on the best way to proceed. There is no consensus.
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