Digital Photography Shortens Production Cycle
As a cataloger, you’re probably using digital photography for some, if not all, of your image creation. Digital photography offers great color and cost savings without the negative environmental impact of traditional film photography.
Indeed, digital photography is fast and flexible. It helps you meet your customers’ changing preferences quickly, while shortening your time to market—whether you’re selling from a printed catalog or online.
Is Technology the Problem?
Early digital cameras were difficult to use, and quality was suspect. In a side-by-side film/digital test in the recently released Graphic Arts Technical Foundation’s (GATF) “Digital Photography Study,” the results show the latest generation of digital cameras has closed the quality gap.
“In comparing the images on the press sheets, it was found that the digital photos actually had fewer defects than the scanned images,” writes the study’s authors, Gregory Bassinger, GATF’s manager of process controls, and Deanne Gentile, information officer for GATF’s Technical Information Group.
Interestingly, the study found that catalog pages were the primary printed product for which digital photography is being used, followed by direct-mail pieces, Web site images and brochures.
The GATF study also indicates improved highlight/shadow detail and greater color fidelity with the digital shots. And digital images bring greater color consistency—from something as simple as an 18-percent gray card (used along with color charts to provide downstream processing control for color reliability) in the shot, to ICC profiling technologies. (ICC profiles are tables used by imaging software to preserve color consistency when the image data are captured, viewed or output on various devices.)
Digitally capturing the image also avoids film variables, such as emulsion, processing and temperature that create potential inconsistencies in image color.
The greatest advantage of digital photography is the time it saves—and with it, the image-production process is cut from days to hours. A few decades ago, separating a transparency or a photographic print on a process camera took an entire day. With a digital camera and a copy of Photoshop, the same process takes a few minutes.
