Posters are easy with this great application.

I had decided to get some posters printed to better publicize my photo show in April which will be at a local wine gallery here in central California’s wine country.

Before trudging off to the printer and getting once more cross-examined on the arcana of RGB versus CMYK (printers speak in an exclusionary language all their own – can you wonder the profession is in terminal decline?) when it comes to printing the wretched thing, I thought I might give my home printer a try instead.

Now page composition is about the last thing I want to do. I admit it – I have little interest in learning some complex page composition application for once a year use, when my time is better spent taking pictures. But then I remembered that one of the fine Apple applications I have enjoyed a lot for book assembly is Pages, so I fired it up and looked for poster templates.

I clicked on ‘Gallery Poster’, clicked on the ‘Media’ icon which popped up my library of Aperture pictures (a feature which arrive with version 2.0.1 of Pages) and simply dragged and dropped a picture of choice onto the template. Pages resizes it automatically as long as you respect orientation – meaning a vertical snap for this template. Ten more minutes were spent on the narrative and the results is this – note the sexy drop shadow I added for effect:

OK, so I’m twelve minutes into this project and so I start getting ambitious. I make half a dozen posters, dragging alternative pictures into each, Export them to a medium quality (to keep file size down) PDF file which I then move to my web site server. A couple of dozen emails later to friends, asking their opinion, and it’s off to bed. The originals are in Canon 5D RAW format but Pages seems to know all about that – smart!

Next morning a bunch of replies shows two clear winners and I print each on 13″ x 19″ satin paper on the Hewlett Packard HP90 ink jet printer. And it’s off to the gallery and local merchants to see how many I can get interested in hanging the poster in their windows.

Postcards announcing the show? No problemo. Into the Pages postcard template and we are done:

I’ll get some two-sided photo paper for these and rip off a few dozen on the HP.

Now is that interactive design or what?

Now back to taking pictures.

There’s little difference.

When making a couple of test prints for my son’s annual birthday picture I realized that the prints were coming out far too cool toned compared to the screen image.

Oh! boy!

Something had changed – whether my screen had aged or my HP DesignJet 90 printer has changed, or the Commies had got to it …. or some combination of these calamities.

While a colorimeter is a nice tool, you can profile your screen almost as well using Apple’s built in profiler, accessed in System Preferences->Displays->Color->Calibrate:

I find a target white point of 6000K gets me the closest screen-to-print match in my environment. Yours will differ.

Then I loaded the latest, updated drivers from HP. It always pays to have the latest drivers for your paper of choice.

What is surprising about this process is how much the perceived colors of your print will vary as you walk around the house with it. My display space is in a corridor with warm, incandescent lighting, so I have to balance skin colors to be right in that location.

They say that to evaluate a sound system use the voice or piano for calibration because we all know how those should sound. Well, for prints, use a human being whose skin color you know.

The results are worth it:

Some day computers screens and color printers will come with built in colorimeters (the latest professional models from HP now have these built in) so that this sort of thing becomes less of an agony, obviating the need for test prints. Stated differently, printer profiling with the current stage of desktop computer technology compares unfavorably for fun with a root canal.