Photobook: Three Wood Lands the Lulu Publishing Versions

In my introduction post on the culmination of a local woodlands photo project I gave an overview of the process and linked to a video review of the Blurb Publishing version of the book. Now I have my Lulu version so I can compare the two results. First a summary of the major differences. 

Attribute             Blurb                                                Lulu

Size                      13"x11" (330 x 280 mm)               8.3" × 11.7" (210 × 297 mm)

Cover                   Imagewrap Hardcover                   Softcover

Pages                    90                                                   104

Paper                    Lustre Premium 100# (148gsm)     Coated White 80# (118gsm)

Price                    US $147.87                                    US $19.03

Before I go into more detail I must reiterate what I said in the earlier post. My experience with Blurb in the past (many years ago) is that the printing varies from book to book in terms of quality. These impressions are therefore based on single instances.

Overall the image quality of the Blurb edition is much better. The black and white images had no color cast to them. However the Lulu edition has a noticeable pinkish cast under tungsten light and this becomes greenish under daylight. I find it distracting and it is unclear what to do about it. I find the contrast is generally lacking as well with the brighter whites muted. There are some theories that you could add a slightly warm/sepia tone to the photos to combat this tendency. I haven't tried this yet. I am considering a cheap magazine print with different examples to see how this might work.  

Many of the color photos are inferior though some are fine. I think the reason is the gamut or dynamic range is limited in the Lulu printing and so the shadows are too dark many times and the highlights again can appear muted. The worst examples are where a fine tonal radiant is present. This happened in a couple of obvious instances where a sky was present at sunrise or sunset. There is awful very distinct banding present in these photos. In the Blurb versions banding is also present but must be looked for carefully. 

Below are some scanned examples of the worst images. I decided to remove images like these in the next edition. 

Lulu Sky Gradient with Blotchiness

Blurb Version

Lulu Sky Gradient with Banding/Contours

Blurb Version

Lulu Sky Gradient with Vertical Banding

Blurb Version

The Next Lulu Edition

I created a new edition what included basic text and grammar edits, removed the most offending gradient images, and then I performed an overall increase of brightness on most of the main images by adding a +20 brightness in Photoshop Elements as an adjustment layer of the original JPEG. This way I could judge the effect while only changing one variable. For the smaller photos included in the text sections I decided to push the brightness to +40 as an experiment in case the others disappointed. 

When considering this I decided not correct all images as some seemed fine in the first printing. I also considering lightening only the shadows but many images seemed darker overall so I took the direction of lightening overall. At $20 per copy this seems reasonable to try and dial in the image quality better. I am worried however that this gets printed on a different machine or that the calibration on the machine has changed and my adjustments are meaningless. 

Many of these self-publishing houses also over color profiles for their presses to simulate the image on screen. I have not delved into the this as I would have to learn how to calibrate my monitor to display the printer profiles properly. For those well verse in color management this maybe an option. I would be interested in learning how well that has worked. 

Next Lulu Edition Results

This next version was much improved though the results are encouraging and also discouraging. For instance I can conclude the +20 increased brightness I applied to the images improved them dramatically in general. The +40 I applied to smaller images seems in most cases to be too much with many appearing over-exposed and washed-out.

I found the black and white images were improved in terms of color cast. They have a very neutral tone compared to the first Lulu book which had a distinctive color cast under any type of lighting. The new Lulu book black and white images are now very similar to the  Blurb version. I did nothing to improve the black and white images with regards to color; which is of course disturbing. I did brighten most of them with a +20 adjustment. I fear the black and white improvement is a just luck.  One image however I submitted as a grayscale as opposed to RGB formatted JPG. This image was noticeably more neutral in tone. I am told that this can get rid of the cast but compromises on some tonal range as the RGB allows the use of colored inks to create more tonal shades. The image I chose is fairly contrasty so does not suffer from loss of tonal range. 

This makes me wonder how much I should attribute the improvements to the changes I made or just variation in printing from batch to batch. This is a bit of a conundrum. I believe that the brightness cannot hurt as it would have improved the first edition and the second was obviously superior.