If you enjoyed the BBC series “Earth from Space” then you will love the book that accompanies the series. I was commissioned by the editor Bethany Wright to work on the images for the book. Working closely with the Picture Editor Laura Barwick I set to translating the images from multiple sources into as coherent and high fidelity rendition as possible.
Again it was a matter of going through a little pain to translate the images as best as possible and using the maximum bandwidth allowed to control color, contrast and sharpness using the most up to date software. It was important to retain subtly in the satellite images as this gave the images a richness that was inherent in the broadcast. Im pleased to see that this has resulted in a very handsome book that has already been drawing praise from online reviewers.
Joining the usual raw video still frames, raw stills and miscellaneous jpegs in the source material were some enormous files direct from satellites. This is the first time I have worked directly on satellite imagery and it was very interesting to do so. Much like raw video shot with Log Gamma the original files were very low in contrast and were enormous (in the hundreds of megapixels range), once layered in Photoshop it was not uncommon for the files to be in the Gigabytes range. Thankfully the monster PC handled the job smoothly and enabled me to extract the underlying image from the source. A very rewarding task.
Available at all good book shops now or Amazon.
Do you or your organisation have a flagship book project underway? perhaps with images from a variety of sources? the likelihood is that the book will vary in quality as most printers will simply use the images as supplied and will not correct for cast, exposure and sharpness issues. If you want the highest possible quality and consistency then you need the images graded in a fully colour managed environment by someone who is experienced and prepared to go through a little bit of pain to make things work, call me and lets discuss.
Stephen Johnson