Bill Atkinson's collection of works, Within the stone

A close-up look at colorful and mysterious minerals. Atkinson's own innovative digital printing method reproduces the amazing beauty hidden inside the “stones”. Written in both English and Japanese.

Meet Bill Atkinson As a founding member of Apple's software development team, Bill Atkinson was a genius programmer who developed numerous applications such as Hypercard, QuickDraw, and Mac Paint. Now a nature photographer, Bill Atkinson has written a book, “Within The Stone,” that beautifully captures the natural colors of minerals.

Bill Atkinson's request was to “capture the rich colors of the minerals as they are...” He also wanted the book to be printed on an inkjet printer. He wanted to express the rich colors of the minerals as they are...” He wanted to express the colors of the minerals as they are, using inkjet printers. As a nature photographer who is particular about colors, it is natural that he would want to express colors that are difficult to express with offset printing. We wondered if it would be possible to print photographic data as is without image processing. There is only one way to reproduce the colors of a print. This is “SUN-M Color's FM Screening,” a technique that has been refined through years of trial and error and the cultivation of know-how.

The result of trial and error This job was like being presented with a tremendous “letter of challenge. His enthusiasm, which never allows for compromise, is not half-baked. He told us how to reproduce the colors using the latest color management techniques. However, reproducing these colors is extremely difficult. This is because printing reflects the natural environment, such as humidity and temperature, to a large extent. To see how close we could get the pigments in the printing press to the dyes in the inkjet, we told them that we would use FM screening.

In FM, minute dots of a certain size are arranged pseudo-randomly, and the density of these dots can express the shading of an image. The FM screening process is the only way to achieve color management and smooth color tones with digital images. For the paper, we proposed “Satin Kintoki 130kg,” which has a glossy finish in the printed areas and a matte finish in the white areas. The book was to be bound with a top binding.

After all the preparations were made, the printing process began. One of our concerns was that the paper would not be backed up, since the density of the paper was 1.5 times higher than normal on thin paper. Normally in Japan, oxidative polymerization is used to dry the ink to prevent this, but in the U.S., UV inks are generally used. This is a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process, but if we spare this time and effort, we cannot promise a good finish. We put our souls into each and every piece of work with great effort and mastery. And the result was the result of repeated trial and error.

The key to success is trust. He is a world-renowned programmer, but when it comes to printing, he has no way of knowing the process or the effort involved. I now wonder if that is why he was able to make it this far. Knowing the limits of printing causes people to give up, but in his case, the opposite is true. It is precisely because he did not know the limits of printing that he was able to present such a difficult challenge.

We first built a relationship of trust with him by offering all the know-how we had. A printed piece is, in a sense, our work. How do we blend our sensibilities into the work we are given? This is something that can only be done if we are in tune with each other. If we are able to communicate with him, we will be able to do good work and obtain good results.

We feel great confidence and pride in having been able to work with a man who, by expressing colors that satisfy him, has also absorbed his own expertise and, above all, has a unique sensibility that we do not have.

Bill Atkinson Born in 1951 in the United States. Califo