Professional Prepress, Printing, and Publishing

Rating:
Summary: An excellent primer for the technology but occasional lapses
Review: As a primer for pre-press imaging, and printing, this book is excellent. It is up to date and, in general, it is well written, and easy to read, sometimes with mild humor. However, that said, there are deviations from this standard. Thus there should also have been more explanatory diagrams, and some are illustrative rather than instructional. For example, the explanation of Under Color Removal would have beeen helped considerably by a good diagram.

Unfortunately there are occasional more serious lapses from the generally high standard of writing. Thus, if this reviewer was not already familiar with the concept of unsharp masking, it is doubtful if the explanation on pages 335-336 would have helped! Similarly, in the discussion of Under Color Removal, the sentence "GCR is more powerful an effect than UCR since it affect the whole image, and often 100% is excessive" is distracting and requires thought to understand within the context. Then, the very next paragraph appears to be discussing a picture than does not exist in this book!

If the reader is looking for an explanation of the background science then he/she should look elsewhere. But that does not appear to be the primary purpose of this book. Instead it is excellent primer and introduction to the technology. I am glad I bought it for that purpose.

Elvin T.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent primer for the technology but occasional lapses
Review: As a primer for pre-press imaging, and printing, this book is excellent. It is up to date and, in general, it is well written, and easy to read, sometimes with mild humor. However, that said, there are deviations from this standard. Thus there should also have been more explanatory diagrams, and some are illustrative rather than instructional. For example, the explanation of Under Color Removal would have beeen helped considerably by a good diagram.

Unfortunately there are occasional more serious lapses from the generally high standard of writing. Thus, if this reviewer was not already familiar with the concept of unsharp masking, it is doubtful if the explanation on pages 335-336 would have helped! Similarly, in the discussion of Under Color Removal, the sentence "GCR is more powerful an effect than UCR since it affect the whole image, and often 100% is excessive" is distracting and requires thought to understand within the context. Then, the very next paragraph appears to be discussing a picture than does not exist in this book!

If the reader is looking for an explanation of the background science then he/she should look elsewhere. But that does not appear to be the primary purpose of this book. Instead it is excellent primer and introduction to the technology. I am glad I bought it for that purpose.

Elvin T.

Rating:
Summary: A mass of information without shape or aim
Review: The author agglomerates a mass of information without any sense of who he is writing for or what exactly he aims to teach. The book is a warehouse of knowledge with information stacked up in it like great piles of lumber. But is it a reference book or an instructional textbook? As the latter it fails. Students won't learn, because they will be overwhelmed with a flood of facts and descriptions that assume more knowledge than they have. As the former, it likewise fails. Experienced practioners looking for references won't easily find the information they want, because any one piece of information gets lost in a great forest of verbiage. Moreover, in terms of style it is wordy and repetitive and full of typos, like a rough draft.

Finally, when reading a book about professional printing that discusses standards of excellence in the industry, one expects that form will reflect content, that the book's own design and typography will exemplify, if unobtrusively, the high standards being discussed. Instead, this book looks like it was done in MS Word in an afternoon. And the index is not only skimpy but done in a font size that is so small and condensed as to be almost unreadable without a magnifying glass. (And without a clear, easy to use and comprehensive index, a book like this becomes almost useless.)

While the author is impressively knowledgeable, we want a book like this to be useful, not just to demonstrate the author's voluminous knowldege. The book should be sent back to the editor for revision aimed at producing a quality textbook with a clear sense of audience and aim, not just cranking out a profit-making tome. The publishers should also take more care with layout and design so the book practices what it preaches instead of contradicting itself from beginning to end.

Rating:
Summary: A mass of information without shape or aim
Review: The author agglomerates a mass of information without any sense of who he is writing for or what exactly he aims to teach. The book is a warehouse of knowledge with information stacked up in it like great piles of lumber. But is it a reference book or an instructional textbook? As the latter it fails. Students won't learn, because they will be overwhelmed with a flood of facts and descriptions that assume more knowledge than they have. As the former, it likewise fails. Experienced practioners looking for references won't easily find the information they want, because any one piece of information gets lost in a great forest of verbiage. Moreover, in terms of style it is wordy and repetitive and full of typos, like a rough draft.

Finally, when reading a book about professional printing that discusses standards of excellence in the industry, one expects that form will reflect content, that the book's own design and typography will exemplify, if unobtrusively, the high standards being discussed. Instead, this book looks like it was done in MS Word in an afternoon. And the index is not only skimpy but done in a font size that is so small and condensed as to be almost unreadable without a magnifying glass. (And without a clear, easy to use and comprehensive index, a book like this becomes almost useless.)

While the author is impressively knowledgeable, we want a book like this to be useful, not just to demonstrate the author's voluminous knowldege. The book should be sent back to the editor for revision aimed at producing a quality textbook with a clear sense of audience and aim, not just cranking out a profit-making tome. The publishers should also take more care with layout and design so the book practices what it preaches instead of contradicting itself from beginning to end.

Rating:
Summary: this book is a disaster
Review: Unfortunately, the most thorough book on the subject of prepress and printing is also one of the slopiest, most badly written books ever. The information is disorganized, the writting is confusing, and there's very little information that can actually be drawn from this 600+ page tome, despite its thoroughness. Poorly-presented ideas and bad grammar abound. There are even passages that are repeated verbatim in several different chapters! Shape up, Frank Romano. Your writting is embarrassing.