Put together a set of images from the South Bank in London, and showed the resulting Photomatix slideshow to a small group from the camera club. Somebody suggested a photobook would be a good idea, so I thought I might give it a go. Seems like we are presenting our work in April at a club evening.
So first choose your photobook supplier. Many on-line offerings with little to choose between them. One or two stood out as being a little different, both emphasised quality and thus were on the expensive side. I plumped for FotoBook in the end, simply because it got some gold award from Digital Photo magazine.
Downloaded the software (straightforward). Reviewed the web site to find some advice on dpi and sizes. Not very clear, the only suggestion being that at a minimum the images should be 1600 pixels on the longest side. No suggestion for dpi.
Exported the images I wanted from LR at 1600 on the longest side and @ 200dpi. Chose a landscape book with a printed cover.
First task was to find photo for the cover. Thought I found one the right shape, the cover illustration being designed to fill both back and front, so letterbox format. Loaded the chosen image into the page and found that the 'Quality' light remained red (= poor). Tried some other uploads into different formats on other pages and found that they were ok. Back to the front cover. Tried different pixel densities. No better. Eventually went into PS and created a black background of exactly the right dimensions and plonked my photos on the top of it. One picture for the front cover and two smaller pictures for the back. Software was happy when I uploaded this new beast. Then had to go back into PS to move the pictures around so that they fit into the cover template. Couldn't do that from the software of course.
Then cheerfully started to load pages up from the template library (easy) and pictures on to the placeholders in the templates. Again easy but found a) 1600 pixels gave only 'acceptable' image quality for the largest boxes, and b) I had no control over cropping of pictures I inserted. The original approach I have to cropping pictures does not work well in standardised book formats.
Plan is to continue to populate the templates so that I have an idea of the flow I want and then revisit the cropping (no guidance on crop ratios btw), picture sizing and dpi for each photo in PS.
Also found out that books need words! Need to write some verbiage for each image. More work than I thought.
