#drum scanning

Why I love making images for print...

And other nostalgia for the over 30’s!

People often ask where I started, and how I got into retouching.

I began my professional career in graphic design studios in the early nineties. I was astounded at the fact that I had to do artwork in black and white, and not in colour with Pagemaker and Freehand on the mac. As a cocky young geeky designer I thought this was so old fashioned. Marked up artwork had to be passed on to a traditional repro house who made it ready for print.

The quality of the work was always brilliant. I realised that they were craftsmen. A great relationship grew and I was later very privileged to be asked to work for them.

It’s all about learning your trade...

Leeds Photo Litho were made up of the best guys in the print industry, a few were almost at retirement age. Each had their own skills, plate makers, film planners, and proofers, all knew their job inside out. Some of these guys had been retouchers in the photographic industry, using dodge and burn, and hand tinting prints. Being told that the best retouchers are the ones who could mix the best chemicals, the ones who would never reveal their recipe.

My role was to setup the digital department while training to be a scanner operator. An easy job you might say, just placing images on a scanner and pressing scan! No, far from it, we are now talking that I considered to be the best drum scanner ever built, and the first one to be used in this country, the Dainippon Screen SG-737 costing £180,000. 

Transparencies, original prints were mounted on a large drum, no preview scan, it didn’t have the capability! Images were set up manually by analysing points in the image by moving the scanner head over the image and reading the colour values on an LED panel for each of the CMYK values, adjustments to the values made by plus or minus on a particular value (effectively creating a custom curve) all of which trains you to view colour by the numbers, that stays with you, even now when I see some colours on screen no matter how calibrated the system, the numbers have to be right! 

Once each image on the drum was setup the size would be calculated and scanned directly to negative halftone separations on film, one for each colour, where they could then be composed into the final films by the planners. If the image was used at another size it had to be scanned again.

Because the scanner (and the operators, 3 of us) were so good there were very few instances for retouching or colour corrections. When it was required, say reducing the magenta in an image, it would be achieved by making a contact negative of the film and then back to positive at a raised exposure, effectively reducing the size of the halftone dots (this was all after seeing the final chromalin proof and seeing it was a little too red), something that is now done in photoshop in a matter of seconds.

We were awarded many accolades for our photographic reproduction, much of which was for famous photographers such as Martin Parr, John Stoddart, Norman Parkinson and Fay Godwin. Traditional duo and tritone work was a speciality—not duotones as Photoshop knows them but a reproduction of a black and white original to be printed with 2 black inks or the addition of warm or cool grey inks to give exceptional tonal range, sometimes more than could be seen in the original print. 

So, whats with all the nostalgia, it’s old tech right?

The reason I think I enjoy talking to people about ‘how it used to be done’ is because lots of the techniques used in traditional prepress and print are often overlooked, in a world of digital capture and print on demand, there are not many people would be prepared to scan an image twice and print an extra Pantone 225 plate so a bunch of flowers would retain their vibrant pink when printed. 

I owe a lot to the old guys I worked with years ago, a lot of what we do in retouching today is based on traditional techniques, dodging and burning, tone curves, removing colour casts, channel mixing, unsharp mask, adding contrast to sharpen and image, under colour removal (UCR) however we preferred integrated colour removal (ICR) which we profess gave us far better images, all came from traditional scanning. 

I believe it’s important in any industry to be very aware of the history of your chosen field. From Photography, design, typography, artwork and print, be mindful of why things are just seem right. There are reasons you should use a grid, know what the golden rule is and why leading is leading and why you should use an em-dash instead of a hyphen!