Making

Within the Stone

Bill Atkinson
Cut and polished rocks
Photograph of petrified wood
Rock cutting and polishing equipment
Large-format scanning digital camera
with cross-polarized lighting.
ColorChecker DC chart
Large prints made with Epson 9600 ink-jet printer
Book layout with Adobe InDesign.
Printed many working drafts on color laser printer.
 The rocks were too colorful to print
correctly with a normal four-color press.
Checking imposition
from PDF files
Made many test press runs to
research highly concentrated inks,
optimized ink densities, and
the best paper and screening
to achieve the widest range of color.
Compare resulting solid ink densities of
SWOP standard and Vanfu high density:

C 1.30 —> 2.03

M 1.40 —> 1.85
Y 1.00 —> 1.56
K 1.70 —> 2.24

The increased densities made possible

a much wider printable gamut.
Then made a custom press profile for
those optimized printing conditions.
CMYK Profile-making target
Four targets on a press sheet
Lab device-independent colors
Profile translates between device-independent
Lab colors and device-specific ink percentages.

Lab Vanfu
Color CMYK

Lab C MY K
 Use the press profile to prepare
and print a test sheet.

The profile separates the Lab colors

into CMYK ink percentages.
All 72 rock photographs on one test sheet
Printing the Book
Binding the Book
 Printing Results
I worked with Vanfu in Japan to achieve a breakthrough
in wider gamut printing from a standard offset press.

We used highly concentrated inks, optimized ink densities,

hybrid screening, high quality paper, and accurate color
management to increase the total gamut volume by 1.6,
which allowed my rock photographs to print beautifully.

We achieved higher quality printing at lower cost by using

color management instead of expensive trial and error on press.
The same methods can be applied to other offset presses.
Within the Stone has won a Gold Ink Award
for excellence and innovation in printing
Beyond the Stone, by Laura Atkinson
That is the labor of the jasper or the agate.
It lays itself down
patiently and permanently;
it never asks to know its own design.

From where we stand,

beyond the stones,
we see patterns they cannot.
A crystal lattice forms an egg.
A clump of iron forms a flame.

If these minerals, in their blindness,

were allowed to make such beauty,
why not assume that we
have been allowed to make our own?
Bill and his family in 2004