On 15 July BobboI@aol.com wrote:
> To both lists, Our club is looking into purchasing a new printer for our
> newsletter so that we have better quality photos in it and I'm soliciting info
> and/or comments from fellow editors on what they use. I have already talked to
> Charley Brown from RTR from whom I gained some useful stuff. I have only been
> doing this for 7 months and definitely still learning.... thanks , til later,
> Bob Iwan , Central Pa Triumph Club, 80 tr8, Hbg pa
Hey Bob,
Photos in newsletters are always a problem. Frankly, I think about
95% of the "photos" I see in the 10 newsletters I receive should have
been left out. What sense is there in putting in a photo that even a
mother couldn't recognize? Three tones... white, black, and
blacker...
The key to getting usable newsletter photos is half-toning.
Half-toning is the newspaper process in which a plastic filter
partially covered with dots is placed over a photo and a new high
quality photo is shot through the filter. This converts the photo to
a new photo which is a page of small dots. The printing press (copier
in our case) will then make a copy which is MUCH, MUCH clearer and
includes a full range of gray tones. A club with 150 members could
probably afford to use offset printing and will definitely get a
newsletter to be proud of using these techniques.
Half-toning can be done by just about any print shop and many big copy
shops. To have photos half-toned you paste the high quality, sharp
focused originals (preferably, but not necessarily, black and white)
onto a background sheet (around here usually 11" X 14", so maybe a
dozen photos will fit) and give it to the printer. A few days later
he gives you back your original and a halftoned sheet. Around here
you then give him a check for $14, shake hands, and walk away. (I
hear the process only costs half that in other parts of the country.)
You then use your usual printer (an Apple, I should hope) to print out
text leaving "holes" where you want photos. You then paste the
trimmed half-toned photos into text sheets and take these pasted-up
masters to a copy shop to use their best copy machine to run off your
newsletter copies.
For a middlin' size club--say up to 150 newsletter copies--this is the
most cost effective way to get high quality black and white photos in
your newsletter. This is essentially the process most small
newspapers still use.
Second best way for a middlin' sized club to do this is take the high
quality, sharp focused originals (preferably, but not necessarily,
black and white) pasted onto an 8" X 10" background sheet to a big
copy shop and have them use their best copy machine while they insert
a half-tone filter in front of the photos and make a copy. This copy
will be NEAR the quality of a true half-tone photo. (Say, maybe 85%
as good.) Then follow the same procedures as above except this time
you only give them a crisp dollar bill instead of the $14 check.
Most scanner software includes the capability to produce a half-tone
but most editors ignore the capability. In this process the scanner
software inserts an electronic filter to half-tone the photo. A high
end printer coupled to a high end scanner will produce photos as
reproducible as the true half-toned photos but will cost tons o'
money. A middle of the pack scanner-printer combo will give photos
about 80-85% of the photo originals BUT you must have a printer with
enough memory to allow you to layout the photos with the text
electronically. (If you do a physical paste up this will add a
generation to the process and you will lose significant quality.)
The moral of the story is: just getting a better printer will not
solve your dilemma. The "second choice" above is by far the least
expensive and the way I suggest you go until you figure out what you
want to do in the long term.
All the above IMHO, of course... Any 'puterhead worthy of the name
will likely dispute the above with his dying breath. ("Throw hardware
at the problem! Throw hardware at the problem!")
Good luck!
--Colin Cobb, Las Cruces, NM, USA
'66 Plus 4 & '65 Tiger MKI
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