SNEAK PEEK #5: Duotones!

Friesens in Altona, MB, prints the majority of UMP's books. Last week, they sent duotone tests for some of the images in Imagining Winnipeg: History through the Photographs of L.B. Foote.

According to Wikipedia, a duotone is "a halftone reproduction of an image using the superimposition of one contrasting colour halftone (traditionally black) over another color halftone. This is most often used to bring out middle tones and highlights of an image."

For Imagining Winnipeg - like with John Paskievitch's The North End and Gerry Kopelow's All Our Changes - we'll be using "warm grey" along with black.

In Winnipeg Modern: Architecture 1945-1975, on the other hand, we opted for "cool grey."

The three sheets  you see on the floor of UMP's offices represent different amounts of each ink.

Steven Rosenberg of Doowah Design, who is the graphic designer for this project, selected a range of photographs for the test. He then took each of those photos and sent both the original as we received it from the Archives of Manitoba (and other sources) and a version that he'd processed in Photoshop.

Apparently, one of the issues with this book is that Foote used a variety of cameras over the course of the four decades he was photographing the city and its people. Which means that the images, though all black and white, are all a little bit different...

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant