Illustrations

[her_benny_hocking]

One thing on this, assuming you do stick with black and white, then, and I know it can be a tad confusing, use the greyscale setting for images. Black and White images as in saved as such on a graphics prog, can come out looking like a black cat who's fallen down an oil well on the same night that the Cosmos exploded and the stars all went out, taking the moon with it, (at the same time as the street lights dept went on strike.) Greyscale is charged at the black and white rate so it doesn't increase the cost at all.

One further thing on this, (sorry, Lulu, but it's true). I did an experiment once by ordering  a Lulu colour book, and a Lulu Studio colour book - both the same book, the difference was minimal, yet the price difference was colossal. So if you do go colour, then it may be best not to do a Studio book.

HBH

[kevinlomas]

The printers use lasers so there is no need to use greyscale. If your images are going to come out too dark you will see it via a proof and then you can lighten them. Don't forget that your images may not look the same in print as they do on screen anyway.

Don't Studio books use a different paper?

[her_benny_hocking]

Unless things have changed dramatically since I was on the staff here, 2006 to 2009, then the advice was always, never upload b and w images, use greyscale instead. But, time does move on, maybe they are better now. Studio does use a different paper, but the difference between my Studio Book and an ordinary colour book was marginal, and did not reflect the huge difference in cost.

[kevinlomas]

Well, no offence, but when there was a 24/7 live Help IM service, they often had no idea about anything and just sent people to self-opening Help pages that did not answer the problems. In fact I often wondered if they even understood English. What I go off is what I have actually done and seen the results.

[Ken Anderson]

Where's Jeeves?

[her_benny_hocking]

All I can add to that is, I had several books with images some time back. I started off with b and w, some were fine, a lot were mediocre, and just as many were atrocious, and on asking advice myself before I joined the crew, I was told only swapping to Greyscale would bring about some consistency, I did that and it worked. Once i joined, I found 'use Greyscale' was the mantra anyway.

I would say using Greyscale is the best practice as they call it, although testing b and w and ordering a print may work out fine, on occasions, but I seriously doubt if it would do for all books for all orders.

J, or HBH, whatever you like.

[kevinlomas]

Far too much relies on the printer's settings, it appears to vary between printers, printing companies and even between jobs. Perhaps they need to standardise it between them? It's a shame the default settings cannot be embeded in to the files. But then again only the printing company has any control over the settings from refilling the inks to when they start to run out.