New Horizons in colour… (as preceded by New Horizons in binding)

The paper of this book has a very soft touch, it brings the pristine whiteness and the binding is flawless

Now it is up to the images to take you on the trip the artist wants to share.

Going with the hour of the day, the weather, the season the images show a variety of contrasts and colours you would never believe to be true.

But they are as the camera captured them.

Only problem is that the cmyk printing process cannot reproduce all of them.

So that’s where the lithographer is needed.

In camera a big part of all the light our eyes can register is captured, but not all.

Printing in cmyk a much smaller part of those colours can be reproduced and this is even more limited if we print on a matt paper, like the one used for new Horizons.

Because the paper has no coating as a top layer, it has a rough structure causing the incident light to reflect in a diffuse way.

Your eyes capture less reflection resulting in a loss of details and contrast.

And then there is the problem of colours you see in the image on screen which simply don’t exist in cmyk.

For instance cobalt blues, bright oranges, vivid greens and all kinds of pastel shades, they all turn into something ugly, something that ruins the whole perception of space and vibrancy.

In many of those images I had to create a new reality in cmyk that mimics the original colours and contrasts as shown on the screen.

The essence of making a good reproduction is to create the same sort of experience of light, space and balance the original has.

Once on press there is not much you can create anymore, it has to be done in prepress.