I recently posted on my experience making a photo book with Blurb.com.
I learned from my mistakes and tried it again, this time making an 8x10 hardbound book. I needed some sample books to send to publishers for my Route 66 book project, so gave it another go.
This time I used their templates, and for text I used text within their templates. (Last time I made the mistake of making text in a Photoshop document, which did not reproduce well.) For pages with photographs, I sized and sharpened my photos to exactly match the openings in their templates. They have many templates for photo pages. Most often I simply centered the photo within the page and made a small caption, but sometimes I used a photo full-bleed (using the entire page to the edges), and three or four times I used a "double-truck" format, (using a horizontal photo to completely fill two pages).
I must say that the quality of reproduction was superb. I used many photos with dark shadows, many of which I have difficulty printing even with custom profiles. The book had no trouble with any image. All shadows kept all of their detail, and no highlights were blown. I have shown the book to many exacting photographers and all have been uniformly impressed with the quality. It has the quality of a very expensive photography book.
I was most impressed with the reproduction of the full-bleed and double-truck pages. For some reason I expected the quality to decrease as the size increased, but I was wrong, the quality increased! The fine details were superbly reproduced.
The software was pretty straightforward to use after getting used to it, though there was an occasional glitch were it did not repaginate on the correct side of the page after I added a page.
As you can tell, I am pleased with the result. I will make some minor additions and corrections, and then use the books to try to find a publisher!
Comments