From: "Paulindr" <paulindr at gmail.com>
on 2011.11.28 at 18:25:55(22436)
Hi.
At risk of repeating what someone already wrote and i didn't read (and following 2 years of silence)...
1. Most printers have a minimum cost for a minimum print run. You can't pay less even if you want less! So small print runs are ALWAYS relatively expensive or even unaffordable.
2. Re the b&w versus colour argument, i believe the pro b&w arguments are spurious (though i'm happy to be proved wrong!). The important thing in any photograph is to capture as much information as possible. A b&w photo fails to capture colours. Thus those colours can never be retrieved or derived from the b&w photo. However, a colour photo can be manipulated to show only greyscale (i.e. b&w). There's no obvious reason why a quality colour photo shouldn't contain sufficient info to allow the rendering of a b&w image at least equal to the quality of an original b&w photo. If you print in colour and publish the colour photo on the web (using highest quality image), all the photo's information will be available to those who want to re-render it.
3. I hate b&w photos of plants and I guess (yes, just guessing) that, in this respect, i am similar to the vast majority of non-professionals who avidly read plant hobby magazines and journals. However, as a scientist, i recognise the value of line drawings. So perhaps in this electronic era, a solution is to use b&w in the journal for scientific and cost reasons but to publish associated colour photos on a website. It won't please everyone but it might be the least worst option!!! (The German
Carnivorous Plant Society bagan life with a very small readership and resolved the colour issue by literally sticking traditional paper-based colour photograps into each copy of the journal. However, it's labour intensive and not exactly cheap!)
Regards
Paul
| 
IAS on Facebook
IAS on Instagram
