James - Thanks for all your amazing help so far with the book.
We have received our proof copy and found that some of the black and white images had a faint white horizontal line across them and generally looking pretty low quality. We have printed the proof copy standard, not premium color. Images were in CMYK - I have since then went back and changed all the photos to GREYSCALE (we are also printing with Ingram, and they require the images to be in GREYSCALE) and checked my PDF proof on the computer, and like the way it looks.
I have exported the book from Idesign as PDF/X-1a (per the KDP guidelines).
Do you have a better export settings recommendation from Idesign to get the best quality black and white photographs? We are printing a second proof copy.
For the book cover from Illustrator, I have done a simple pdf export, high quality print and it looked good on our proof.
Thanks again for all your help!
Dorka
KDP proof/author copies are the next thing to worthless except to check page comp, binding/cover layout accuracy and organization. They are little more than an equivalent of the old "blue-back" advance reader copies of books, if you've ever encountered them.
For one thing, despite the insistence of some KDPgurus™, they are not run on the main production lines, but on secondary printers of office-grade quality (if that) and questionable maintenance/calibration. So the print quality, cover and binding alignment and overall finish are in no way representative of a production copy. This is true nowhere more than image quality. Regular KDP quality can be a little iffy, with fades and streaks found in something like 10% of print runs. (All copies in modest print runs are usually consistent, but maybe one run in ten is either wholly flawed or has flawed copies in it.)
It's perhaps the best example of Amazon's weird save-pennies-in-the-wrong-places model for KDP. But the bottom line is that proof/author copies are only worth ordering if you have questions about how the book, overall, comes out of the chute — not for anything like a a quality or "press" check.
Editorial mode off now. 🙂
Because of the poor loop from submission to actual print copy, it's hard to guess how every image will come out. (Keep in mind that Amazon has several printing plants across North America alone, more around the world, and most have multiple production lines... so consistency is completely out the window.) Their recommended standards are quite vague and as many other things in their info system are out of date or just plain wrong, it's foolish to put too much faith in accuracy of those standards. (Okay, wait, I said editorial mode off...)
For black and white interiors, I recommend converting images to grayscale, as you've done, and using Photoshop's Black and White conversion feature to select the right "curve" for each image to get a good eyeball result. Be sure to place them at 300ppi or greater (effective — as the Info window shows you). I rarely bother with PDF standards for these kind of exports, but I do set the color mode to grayscale using the sGray color model — which makes the color/standards gururs here weep and tear their hair at my slackiness — and I have yet to have serious issues with the printed resolution and tonal range of images in any KDP production-printed book. (I am fortunate in that I have seen very, very few image issues such as fading or streaks, but I have no idea what my customers get.)
You can do a reasonable job of proofing by printing the image pages on a any good office-grade printer, preferably a laser printer with optimized resolution and a grayscale mode. (That is, not a low cost-per-page general printer or a photo printer.) If nothing else, it should give you a good approximation of the tonal range of the image as it will print from KDP. My experience across time and platforms and projects is that there's a tendency to make monochrome images too dark/low in tonal range, which looks good on the screen but tends to print dark and muddy. So once you find an optimal setting, get used to what might seem like slightly washed-out images in the ID layout.
So—
- Don't rely on KDP author proofs. Order them only if you need "proof" of how the book will go together, but not for any print or finish quality issues.
- It's not a workaround to publish the book and order Author Copies, which will come from a regular production line... but take at least three weeks to arrive. (This is a deliberate delay by KDP; I have had customers get books in hand from a new listing ten to twelve days before I got my "Author Copies.")
- Convert all monochrome images to grayscale and insert at 300+ effective PPI.
- From good-office-printer proofs, adjust image tonal range; these may look light or washed out in the ID layout.
- Submit the interior PDF using any PDF standard you choose (X-1a is as good as any), but set the color mode to grayscale/sGray color model.
That should get you the best results, consistently, although once you actually get production copies you may find you need to change the tonal range of some images. Don't obsess over it, given the variability of KDP output, but fix really dark or light images towards a better "center."
Hope that helps.
AdChoices