Before we close the doors for our holiday break we hold team get-togethers at the Bindery and Lab. Every year they're truly inspiring, and I thought I’d try and tell you why, and say thank you. The chart shows Queensberry's work in progress for the last nine months, lifted from yesterday's daily management report. It shows, more clearly than words, how our business trebles every November and December, as it has for more than 40 years. We call this hay-making season, a nod to my farming background. You have to make hay while the sun shines, and when I was a kid our neighbours turned To View More >>

We'd never been to Lyttelton until a couple of years ago. At school we'd all learnt it was Christchurch's port, but that didn't mean you had to visit. Now everyone knows it's at the epicentre of Christchurch's earthquake. The reason I did eventually visit Lyttelton was to catch up with Johannes van Kan and Jo Grams. It's a fabulous little town, with a nice traditional pub (you walk down the corridor to the bathroom, just like the old days), lots of local music, good restaurants, great coffee, a beautiful setting. And in centre of the town the original, often funky, sometimes beautiful, apparently To View More >>

Have you noticed our finely polished "tech tips" get less Likes than the other posts? :( So I thought I'd just remind you that us tech support staff are real people too. I went to our nation's capital over the weekend as a bit of a family outing. I didn't go to look at parliament buildings. Boring, in fact I didn't even see them in the distance. I went to the Weta Cave, where Weta Workshop is based and where they made the props for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Hobbit etc. I have to be honest, I nearly had a nerdgasm. Not only because of the artistic ability of the teams who do this work To View More >>

Pete started off his recent posts by saying that colour management is one of the cornerstones of digital photography, but often misunderstood. Let me describe what you can reasonably expect from a sound colour management system consistently applied (certainly not miracles!). What you can expect 1. A reasonable indication of what your final print will look like (assuming you're sending the files print-ready). 2. To avoid gross errors (an Adobe 1998 file treated as if it's sRGB will look strikingly different, especially if colours go out of gamut). 3. Predictability: You can send your files to the To View More >>

Ian likes to talk about the good old days, when colour correction and colour management were a matter of picking up the phone and complaining to the lab. OK … I remember them too. Well, you can still outsource colour correction, but colour management is a shared responsibility now. In my earlier post I talk about screen calibration and soft-proofing, which most of us at least know about - but few people understand that taking all the care in the world over those won't be enough if your working environment is wrong. Try this experiment. First thing in the morning, sit down at your desk (where To View More >>