Film Positives

Obtaining good quality film positives for photo mechanical processes can be difficult. Below are a list of recommended repro houses based in and out of London who have been making positives for years. Be sure to know what line screen you want before you contact them. If in doubt, ask in the print workshop. Hexio are a specialist repro house based off the Old Kent Road and will produce the best quality imageset film for screen printing, photo lithography, photo etching, polymer and gravure. A Bigger Splash   

100 Open Source programs for Audio and Video

Open source applications make it easy to create, listen to and view digital audio and video content. Animation 1. Blender Replaces: AutoDesk Maya Suitable for professional use, Blender is a 3D animation suite that offers modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and game creation capabilities. It also features a customizable interface, and it can import and export from a wide variety of file formats. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X. 2. Art of Illusion Replaces: AutoDesk Maya Art of Illusion isn’t quite as polished as Blender, but its developers claim the latest version (released September 2013) “is both stable Read more

Standard book sizes

Books can be any size. Here are the standard sizes to which most books follow:   134 x 197mm (Standard) 216 x 138mm (Demy) 210 x 148mm (A5) 234 x 156mm (Royal) 249 x 177mm (Pinched Crown Quarto) 246 x 189mm (Crown Quarto) 276 x 219mm (Demy Quarto) 297 x 210mm (A4)   it is often cheaper to use one of these.

Dealing with grids in Photoshop is a pain

With GuideGuide, it doesn’t have to be. Pixel accurate columns, rows, midpoints, and baselines can be created based on your document or marquee with the click of a button. Frequently used guide sets can be saved for repeat use. Grids can use multiple types of measurements. Best of all it’s free. Honestly, if you haven’t started downloading it by now, you’re probably a masochist. Weirdo… Grid Tab Fill in the fields and click the GG button to create your grid. Negative margin values will place the guides outside your selection. Hold the clear guides button to clear all input fields. Clicking the Read more

Software at UCL Clusters

There are many applications available at UCL Clusters that would be useful to Slade students, such as Photoshop It’s worth noting that some Clusters, such as those in UCL Libraries, are open 24 hours at certain times of year. Full list of software is on this webpage: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/purchasing/software/software_bid/applications

Colours suitable for newsprint

Newsprint has a limited range of colours that work well. Here are the colours that work best when printing offset PDF: Colours for newsprint

Adobe Print Publishing Guide

This book explores the processes and issues involved in preparing color publications for reproduction on a commercial printing press-a set of tasks known as the prepress process. Despite being written in 1995, this book contains useful information for those starting out with using commercial printing presses, especially industry standards and explains key terms. I have removed obsolete information and added some annotations. PDF: Adobe Print Publishing Guide (1995)