By Mark Heliger

Recently I was chosen to design a coffee table photographic book documenting the current and future state of the Florida Everglades. It is called Light Fading — Reflections on the Imperiled Everglades, by independent photographer Joel M. Curzon. Joel spent six years photographing the Everglades and additional time researching the environmental impact and influences on one of the most unique ecosystems in the world.

Joel insisted on reproducing the subtle qualities evident in this habitat: namely the combination of the flora, fauna, and terrain in addition to the more popular creatures of the water. Joel felt that the images wrapped a certain emotional context around the themes and messages of the book. In converting the color from RGB to CMYK as required for traditional offset printing, some colors do become lost in translation. I could compensate for that loss through careful observation using before-and-after comparisons, to allow most of the values to be reclaimed in post-processing.

As I worked with the Everglades' images there were some situations where using the Photoshop® would not maintain the subtleties that existed in the native RGB. Ahead, is a step-by-step review of three instances where LightZone® carried the day and gave me images that were actually better in CMYK than the original.

The Pineland Mists

The first thing I did as part of this assignment was to calibrate my equipment to match the specs that would be used in the final process. To that end, I asked for a CMYK color profile from the pre-press house that was in charge of preparing the files that go to the printer. Generally, I use a Mac Pro with a 30” Apple® Display that is calibrated to my own fine-art photographic printing. I get extremely reliable results for myself, but I needed to confirm or deny that the calibration had meaning in the world outside my studio.

I chose some representative examples and in the process, found some consistent hits in the loss of certain magenta-type tones and rendering quality variations of certain greens, and a few purples that simply disappeared. In this first image, I discovered that some of the subtlety of the tone in this misty morning vanished in the conversion process. I tried using regional masks to capture or preserve these tones in before-and-after review using another photo editor only to find that it couldn’t be done. It turned out that any attempt to grab the tones to separate a few tonal values or interpret the photo for dramatic effect actually degraded the image.

Let me explain the problem a little more. The tones in the image are very subtle and when the conversion begins, the shades of gray that are at the fringes of the tree branches flip toward red because of their particular shade. I tried to create a tonal mask in the other editor to work around that, but I could not isolate those tones. In fact, trying to control the photo actually created a different mood entirely… a mood that looked like a problem to the book's author.

That’s when I turned to the LightZone ZoneMapper tool to save the day. This is one feature unique to LightZone and it worked like a charm in less than two minutes, with just a few clicks.

STEP-BY-STEP

Task: Convert photographs to CMYK for coffee table book

Road block: Subtle colors may not transfer, adjustment changes tonality

Solution: Grab the tonality with ZoneMapper and then convert to CMYK

Figure 1 Working with the original image on the left in Photoshop, I tried to get a handle on the tonality by using layers with masks. This created a color shift in the pine needles when converted to CMYK. There was no way to get around it. With LightZone my results, on the right, were stunning.

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