Christian says:
They say that former smokers are much more anti smoking than people like me who have never smoked and, being Macintosh militant and rabid, could therefore well be. You see I am a convert to the Mac way of doing things easier, faster, better, proactively rather than reactively and was a (hawk, spit) Wintel baby before that.

I wish, I wish. But to give credit where its due, all that you-beaut desktop publishing stuff belongs to the organisation for which I manage the Artroom. It does also help that the boss of that organisation is a fellow diver (and close friend) who actively supported this project. Thanks Roger, lots.

Me? Vintage 1957 diver, keen u/w photographer and somewhat radical thinker, or so I am often and in no uncertain terms told, when it comes to matters scuba." I hope that, no, I'm _sure_ that you have all enjoyed this presentation.

As for the person who _really_ did the work, one Phillip Lewis, currently in transition from the offset pre-press world (ie paper printing presses and the like) to the esoteric world of print media by any means (ie screen printing etc), his only actual contribution to this "bio" thingie is:

"Whilst .gif is good and glitzy, pdf is Phil's preferred process for providing proprietory proofs (ie a solution looking for a problem ) and pleasingly pursued the progress of this pageant of pictures." In other words, it was fun, hope y'all enjoy/ed the experience

What I, and my ever patient and much better expert, Phillip, did was scan them, in the accepted way that most of us on this medium now understand. That's fine as it goes.

The physical cards themselves, however, have been produced by an entirely different medium: the printing medium. Because the printing medium is entirely different to any other, we were able to play tricks but before I tell you how, I must explain why.

In printing an ink colour, any ink colour, is much like binary code: it is either a 1 or a 0. A green, for example, on a printing press can never be anything but that green. A photograph, in glorious living technicolour, has been created chemically, where the chemicals (I presume, don't really know) can run into each other to create the whole gamut.

To create a lighter pattern of the above green the printer would use a "screen" such that, in the area desired, he creates a dot pattern (bits of white amongst the green) to create the illusion of a lighter shade.

Strike's cards have been created by printing them in the illusion of a photograph. This is called CMYK, or uncommonly nowadays, Process Printing. Those initials stand for _C_yan (a precise shade of blue), _M_agenta (a precise shade of red), _Y_ellow (a precise shade of yellow) and blac_K_ (a precise shade of black). I'm quite sure that this readership will not need to ask why _K_ blac_K_.

Blue? Brown? Beige? Burgundy? Buff?

OK, what happens with a photograph is that it is "separated" into its CMYK component parts with each of those components taking on a separate and variegated dot pattern, properly called a half tone. These half tones are then printed on top of each other to create the effect of that photograph. To create a green, for example, smaller and larger Cyan and Yellow (probably with the odd Magenta and blacK thrown in) dots will form on top of each other. Its a pretty complicated and precise process, here simplistically put and, for those of you unaware of it, take a magnifying glass to any, ANY, _printed_ "photograph" and you will see what I mean. This only excludes colour laser photocopiers which create the same effect by putting CMYK toner dots on top of and alongside each other in a kind of stochastic effect, oh gawd, you don't wanna know.

To get back to my saying that Julian is in fact perfectly correct:

When we scanned these (printed) cards we then electronically "descanned" the scans as it were (although in 1937 it took an artisan to _physically_ etch these "scans" onto the printing plates, an awesome task and no one today would have a clue how to do that). Probably took at least a week per plate, dot by dot by painstaking dot.

So now, Julian, you are looking at the image more or less how the original artist had "colourated" the original black and white photographs. Alhough previously you had thought that they were good, the _extremely slight_ advantage of the fact that they have been descanned is in fact noticeable.

Of course, it also helps that we enhanced the colours themselves to their original shades, or at least VERY close.

Ain't technology wonderful?

Cheers,

Christian