Recommendations for B&W photobook printing?

[Mark II]

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Can anyone recommend a professional quality black-and-white photobook printing service (in Europe)?

I need to print a largish (33x28) format 160 page book. I have been trying to use Blurb, but the print quality is very poor with B&W (notably, I get horrible colour casts as if the Cyan on the CMYK printing has a subtly different response curve - the colour shift is as much as 5% away from neutral at some grey levels when checking RGB values from a scan of a page).

To show an example of the problem with Blurb, this is a page photographed and with the saturation increased significantly - the effect in "real life" is much smaller, but still obvious.

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Edited August 4, 2019 by Mark II
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[CharlesL]

Since no one has replied, here is a potential roundabout way to your goal. Print the pages yourself on a good inkjet printer, such as an Epson P800, or find a shop that uses one. Two-sided photo papers are sold in the U.S., so presumably in Europe, too. Set the pages up properly and take the sheets to a bindery.

 

[Guest Nowhereman]

@Mark II How many copies do you need? A couple of copies on an inkjet is feasible and can be useful as a maquette, if that is what you want.

You can look at my thread, Photobook Publishing and its Discontents, which  charts my journey that started with having a dummy printed on an on-demand digital printer in Thailand and ended with quite a different book, which will be presented at Offprint Paris 2019 held 7-10 November at the École des Beaux Arts, concurrently with Paris Photo.

I ended up working with what I call the "Hollander Dream Team" for the collaborative effort of publishing this book, comprising a photobook designer/editor, a hand bookbinder and a lithographer — all three at the top of their field in the Netherlands and internationally, having together produced many prize-winning photobooks. The thread discusses several alternatives, as well as "blind alleys", that may interest you.

[Mark II]

Thanks for the replies!

Unfortunately, I only need two cleanly printed copies, and I need them ready fairly soon. Added to that, the book is 160 pages and in a large format (the largest that Blurb can provide, which is only just big enough here). This makes a lot of the good quality options unviable.

I have looked in to inkjet printing, but the binding presents a problem. It is not something that I have much experience of, and the only local companies that can bind appear to be relatively expensive and unlikely to be sufficiently robust.

Blurb are reprinting a copy at the moment to check if this was a one-off problem, as a print of an earlier draft was much better quality. Based on that I will try to figure out what to try next...

[Mark II]

An update - and a positive outcome. Blurb reprinted the two books and have since printed another two copies. This time there are no clearly visible colour-casts in the images.

It is a bit worrying that their print output is clearly not well controlled. However, their support and rectification of the problem was first class.

[Jeff S]

Good news. Did they give a reason for the difference?

Jeff

[kuad82001]

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I just got my book a few days ago of my photographs taken with the M Monochrom and have the same issue! Waiting for a reply from Blurb as the have handed off the problem to the "proper team". Cover was spot on and the pages look great but the green tint, the rainbow like effect like in the OP example...are there other companies that do a better job? I am using Lightroom.

 

Grateful