Version 1, or ... "Is my eyesight failing me?"
We have talked for a long time about trying to produce some visual aids for coffee roasting. The problem is how to accurately reproduce the color and texture of coffee in print. We thought we would just dive it and give it a try. Our first round of postcard prints wasn't so grand - the luminance of the image on screen was lost in print, and the color representations are very dark. With a bit of strained logic, I decided to send out these cards instead of scrap them. In a way, the difficulty in discerning the color differences between 434 and 440 f on the card reproduces exactly the real experience of indentifying roast colors under household lighting. Take the card out into good balanced light, diffused sun light for example, and you start to see the slight differences in darkness. But more important, the card tries to show differences in bean expansion and surface texture during this rather slim (yet critical) range of roast temperatures. To put it bluntly, household lighting, incandescent in particular, sucks for judging roasted coffee. So to put our too-dark card to use, try to look at it under some good, even, daylight-balanced light. We will do a re-print, and we will make it somewhat easier to read the images.
Front of screen adjusted card, V 1.0
