Press Check and Funding
Press Check
Last Thursday I made the long drive up to Montmagmy, Quebec (6 hours north of Ottawa) for my press check day on Friday.
8:30am on Friday morning we went to the printing plant to start the press checks. The cover came off the press looking really good, but needed a little fine tuning. After the adjustments were made, the cover looked great!
Onto the inside pages.
This didn’t go as smoothly as I or anyone else had wanted. The images looked way to dark. We did a test run of the first half of the book and every plate had an issue. Everything was coming out too dark, 7% to dark to be exact. 7% may not seem like a lot, but with High Key images 7% is a lot. We checked my files and the converted files which the printers had made, and both of them showed the same reading for the highlights of the skin, 7%. The plates were printing out at 14%.
This is why there is the option to do a press check, to ensure that what you see on screen is what is printed.
Around 3pm we ended up making a test plate with an curve adjustment to the printers files and then did another test run. The images looked great! Now they had to make new plates for the rest of the book. 10+ years ago this would have been quite the process, taking a couple days to prepare all 23 plate for my book. However with modern technology, the plates were ready to start printing around 6pm.
We stayed at the printing plant until I was confident that the problem was fixed, 10:30pm Friday night.
Unfortunately, the entire book wasn’t printed while I was there, as they ran out of paper (as a result of doing so many tests earlier on in the day). I’m confident with the quality of the first 1/2 to 3/4 of the book, that the amazing print technician, Sebastien, will print the remaining pages with as much care as he did the first part. This guy is a real perfectionist and has a high standard, just like me!
I can’t wait to receive the finished product and start shipping them out all over the world!
Funding
If you didn’t see the funding page on Kickstarter, I reached my goal and exceeded it easily. 152% was my total funding on Kickstarter, with another $300 in cash sales. Funding came in from around the world, six continents to be exact! Here are the parts of the world that I will be sending my book to:
Canada – Aurora, Brampton, Cornwall, Edmonton, Gatineau, Halifax, Mississauga, Niagara, Oakville, Ottawa, Toronto.
United States – Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington.
Australia,
China,
Columbia,
Denmark,
Germany,
Ireland,
Netherlands,
Switzerland,
United Kingdom
I will be updating the Icon Imaging website in the next week with a way to purchase the book online.
Thank you to everyone that has already purchased a book!
Here are some photos/videos from my day doing the press check.