Traveling Through Digital Waters

JOHN MCMANUS is celebrating a birthday. Ten years ago this October, he and his wife Gloria released their first catalog: a 32-page, black-and-white collection of products to make travel easier. They called their creation Magellan’s.

Today, McManus sounds like a proud father when he notes, “We’ve been on the Inc. magazine list of the 500 fastest-growing companies three years in a row (1995-1997). That’s a figure that we don’t mind sharing.” The cataloger’s annual revenue is up to $25 million and print runs vary between two and three million catalogs, with mailings scheduled four to five times a year. “We’ll be doing 100 pages, perfect bound, for fall, which will be the largest yet,” McManus beams.

What’s the secret of Magellan’s success? McManus attributes his company’s growth to sticking by its founding principles of delivering high- quality goods and spit-polished customer service. “We are still very hands-on and very customer driven,” McManus explains. “We spend a lot of time with our travelers who phone us. We don’t use a fulfillment house to take the calls because of the amount of information we like to pass on to our customers regarding how to use our products.”

This attention to detail is maintained from concept to fulfillment; for the creative process, this could spell workflow bottlenecks. But digital preprint technologies and a personal relationship with its preprint agency has meant clear sailing for Magellan’s, all the way to achieving filmless production.

A Star is Born

Near the close of the 1980s, to produce the catalog’s first issue McManus acquired a used Apple MacPlus and took a course on using Adobe PageMaker (then owned by Aldus). In 1995, McManus enlisted the services of John Balint—his former PageMaker coach and partner of Balint & Reinecke, a Santa Barbara, CA-based prerpess agency—to produce the growing catalog.

Balint and his team have guided Magellan’s through the relatively new waters of digital production. The catalog images—product shots and live models—are captured with MegaVision’s S3 digital camera by Richard Salas, an early adopter and strong proponent of digital image capture. “Richard Salas, as a photographer, costs more per hour than the fellow we had running film through a 2 1⁄4-square camera years ago, but the speed and the accuracy [is better]: I can’t say that we have ever had to go back for retakes, for a reshoot on any of the clothing shots because we saw [potential mistakes] right there,” McManus says.

The ability to preview images and make changes, all in the same day and all before the models go home, saves not only production costs but significant time that translates to significant revenue. “We can get products photographed and [processed] at a date much closer to production than a lot of catalogers,” McManus states, explaining that having new products in the marketplace first gives the catalog a lift.

The Next Best Thing to Being There

A recent addition to the digital workflow is the use of virtual background images from Shot On Location (www.shotonlocation.com). A stock photo company of sorts, Shot On Location specializes in digital compositing images to enable print producers to leverage the blue-screen technology so adored by the cinema industry.

The time and resources required to move the personnel and equipment overseas for location shots is prohibitive. So when Balint discovered digital backgrounds, McManus realized that Magellan’s location problem was solved. “The virtual background gives the flavor that we are dealing with travel here, far more than we could ever do with regular sweeps and backdrops in the studio. We’re quite pleased with it.”

Although in principle digital backgrounds are as easy to work with as drag-and-drop, achieving a seamless effect is more complicated. First, Balint chooses a handful of backgrounds that he feels will be appropriate for the look and feel of Magellan’s, and he outputs them to a Kodak DCP9000 digital color proofer. For each target image, he and Salas work through a preparation checklist to ensure that the models will blend effectively into the background:

• Lens selection: The type of lens used to capture the background should be the same used to capture the subject.

• Angle and quality of light: The subject should be lit to match the conditions of the background. Shadows, Balint says, can provide a lot of useful information.

• Position of the camera: “That’s a little harder to nail right on,” Balint cautions. “We assume that most of these backgrounds were [photographed] hand-held; that a normal-height person stood holding a camera and clicked. We’ve tried to keep that consistent, and we’ve created a fixed distance to our models.”

The thumbnail images of every shot are displayed on a monitor for everyone on site to consider. Corrections and re-takes happen immediately.

Once Magellan’s signs off on the shots, Balint and his team hit the computers—a network of Apple G3 workstations—to pull the images and the layout together. First, the model image is masked using Ultimatte KnockOut. Several masking applications are available, but Balint found Ultimatte’s solution to be the most seamless and precise. Once masked, the model is dropped into Adobe Photoshop.

Scale is Balint’s next consideration. “If the size isn’t just right, the illusion is blown,” he says. To achieve the correct scale, he compares a landmark’s length in the background to a feature of known length on the model: an eight-inch brick to the model’s nine-inch foot. “Then it’s a matter of fine-tuning the lighting using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop: If the model looks a little flat in the sunny background, I’ll dodge in some highlights on the sunny side, or conversely burn in the shadows. And then add the shadows on the ground using all the tools in [the application],” Balint explains.

He saves the composed image, pre-CMYK, pre-sharpened, “So that if the client has any concerns, we can go back and change things without destroying the file.”

For color conversion from RGB to CMYK, Balint recently began using LinoColor from Heidelberg CPS, the same software application his prepress vendor uses when scanning. “We found that in shooting digital and dropping [the model images] into Photoshop and color separating them, the models were coming out a little red,” Balint explains. “I was pointing a finger at the digital camera technology because we never really had this problem with our conventional shots. But as it turns out, Photoshop has a weakness in color separating fleshtones; they just tend to go pink. We’re still in our infancy period with LinoColor, but so far, we like what we see.”

Blazing a Filmless Trail

Once Balint’s team finalizes the catalog’s layout and Magellan’s has approved the pages, the files are converted to PDFs (Adobe’s Portable Document Format) and sent to Quad/Graphics for printing. The files, however, are not transmitted digitally. Even with the file size reduction inherent in the PDF conversion, each page of the Fall catalog contains up to 20MB of data.

“If we were sending this catalog digitally, it would be cranking all night,” Balint laments. Instead, he has chosen to stick with overnight carriers. But instead of sending removable storage media, Balint removes one of his external G3 hard drives, complete with all PDFs and their native application counterparts, and ships the entire drive to Quad. No bad disks, no compatibility problems, no missing components.

“The PDF files go direct to the printer, and the time has shortened, and the cost has come down on all of that to where I think we will see a bit of a savings even at this stage,” McManus predicts.

For now, the benefits of digital prepublishing technologies and the revised look and feel of Magellan’s catalog can be measured only in terms of manufacturing costs and time to market. Although important benchmarks, they cannot provide the crucial data of customer reception.

Will the new production methods translate into more sales? Not even McManus knows. “We just don’t have that side-by-side test to say that going to the ‘digital location,’ if you will, always results in higher sales per square inch. All we’ve had to rely on are the general comments that our travel gear specialists get from our customers who say they just really love the presentation.”