On Tue, 22 Oct 2002 22:45:42 -0500 Laurie Solomon (laurie@advancenet.net)
wrote:
> I just question these sorts of quasi-scientific and
> psuedo-empirical assertions as grounds for legitimizing an opinion.
It's not 'pseudo-' anything, it's years of painful screw-ups - some by me,
many not - lost clients and trashed income, confirmed by knowing other
people frequently have similar problems with magazine production. Read the
pro-dig list for plenty of examples. But please, allow that I do know what
I am talking about, without having to do a formal poll and statistical
analysis. Platform argy-bargy is not amenable to reductionism, ISTM it is a
cultural phenomenon. So, in an effort to get away from hair-brained geeky
diatribes about architectures and address spaces...
6 or so years ago, when I began supplying scans to magazines (or trying
to), it was almost always an invitation to disaster. Most designers had no
idea at all what to do with them, had no knowledge of CM or even
rudimentary calibration - they'd just run their monitor at whatever
settings they liked to look at. The only bits of PS they had ever used were
ancillary to Quark, usually just for making quick positional scans;
production scans were always done by the repro house at print time. They
had, and still have, little control over config or environment lighting,
and their whole workflow revolved around trannies or prints and Cromalins.
WYSIWYG accuracy just doesn't matter when dealing with Pantones and
positional scans and the repro house doing the rest. If the Cromalin
doesn't match the tranny, they shout at the repro house, not go rummaging
around profiles looking for a reason.
The vast majority of these people used Macs and still do, and have done so
ever since DTP displaced scalpels, galleys and Cow Gum in the mid 80's.
Macs were streets ahead of PC's and Apple made that market their own (I was
there, working for Mac User from the pilot issue on, and the first
publishing co in UK to adopt Mac DTP for production). Whether or not the
Mac is still a superior tool matters less than the fact that they are
locked in to a legacy culture of software, hardware and understanding -
exactly the same as those of us who have used PC's for yonks.
So the question of which is 'best' really doesn't arise, it's what they are
used to, what they know how to work to get their job done and off to the
pub with least effort. The workflow they have been using for the past
decade and a half DOES NOT RELY ON COLOUR MANAGEMENT, so it scarcely
matters that the Mac does it, they neither know nor care about it.
And that is what we, as photographers who have had to address all this
stuff, have walked into, demanding that they change and learn new tricks.
Just as we have had to look beyond what was previously the boundary where
photography ended and DTP and reprography began, we are requiring them to
now do what was previously entrusted to repro houses and printers.
So : I would explain the creative reasons why I wanted to shoot neg and
scan, and they would think 'cool' until the mag came back from the printers
looking like gunge. Many were quick to assume that if things now went awry,
it was either the fault of (a)digital images in general (b)the photographer
is an idiot (c)it must be those rotten Windows machines (d)there is stuff
here I don't understand.
Even if they got to point(d), a natural conservatism (of sticking to what
works and not pissing off the publisher), and time pressure, kicked in. The
problem with this is that photographers are not exactly indispensable; why
learn all that stuff, why risk the unknown, when you have photographers
coming out of your ears?
Moreover repro houses had seen the way the wind was blowing and tried to
lock out photographer scans, by bundling scanning charges into repro
contracts so mags wouldn't want to pay the photographer. Some of the most
talented designers I know refuse point-blank to accept digital images,
ostensibly for aesthetic reasons, but I know that the real reason is that
they simply do not understand the workflow needed and don't see any reason
to change. It's their party, what can you do?
It *is* changing, slowly, and I now deal with several who have no problems
with dig.images. They have learned what they needed to. But the real reason
for them doing so is money, not technology. The pressure has come from the
beancounters upstairs, so that the mags can use electronic delivery rather
than couriers, cutting production time and cost. The need to be able to
make use of a deluge of emailed PR images and jpegs from libraries is
another factor.
To return to the original point, then, in my experience 'graphics
professionals' tend to choose Macs because that is The Standard for their
sector, for historical reasons as much as anything. It's culture,
psychology, economics, habit, not technological. The manufacturers
understand this! That is why their marketing is about identity and
lifestyle, not facts.
The irony is that the Mac's vaunted bullet point for digital imaging -
integrated CM - hasn't often figured on the radar of many 'graphics
professionals' in the past, to judge by lot of magazine designers working
in UK. It's probable that this may change as a new generation of designers
take over, but somehow I doubt that colleges spend much time on the subject
because the lecturers pre-date the technology too.
> But
> you
> comment does raise another question to which I do not have any answer of
> my
> own; the question is: are Power Macs really Macs
AFAIK, yes. But I was just using the Power Mac as an example of a knackered
old machine with a past-it monitor, under specced for handling large scans,
and still on a lot of desks because the accountants say so.
Regards
Tony Sleep -
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