Some more info on working with Blurb...
I imagine you'll get better quality if you size the photos in good
photo-processing software rather than let Blurb do it for you. That
is what Blurb says, and it makes sense. So you have a bunch of
3000x2000 images on your hard drive or maybe 1500x1000 images on
SmugMug. But they need to be re-sized...
My work flow working with photos on my drive:
a. Decide on the general content of the next page or two as the
story unfolds.
b. Go into Lightroom, find the 3-8 images I'll be using next. E.g,
next I need one of the better hummingbird shots, one or two
butterflys, maybe a shot of one of the group members in the butterfly
farm. [Images previously appropriately sorted into order and rated
1-5 stars; thus, related images are together, and I don't need to
revisit the question of which of several similar shots I should use.]
Note whether vertical or horizontal, deserve full page/full bleed, a
1/9th of the page, or somewhere in between.
c. Go back to BookSmart. Spot a template that allows me to use my
one good vertical and a couple of moderately good horizontals on the
next page. Mutter about the fact that the template puts the vertical
near the fold, the two horizontals on the outside, and I had wanted
something the other way around. Mutter some more. Decide to live with
it. Make a note to fire off a note later to Blub asking once again
for increased flexibility in their templates, such as the ability to
flip them horizontally or vertically. Recall their forum discussion
on this issue where they basically said: "live with it." Move note
about firing off a note to Blurb into the Don Quixote file.
d. Note that the Vertical is 1113x1630 pixels and the Horizontals
are 1113x680. [You do this by mousing over the page template, a popup
window appears for three seconds with the "ideal size" information.]
e. Go back to Lightroom. Crop, sharpen etc. as required. Export to
file with a resize to 1113x1630 or 1113x680.
f. Go back to BookSmart. Import the pictures from file. [If using
Smugmug, I expect this step will take longer than reading from your
local disk.]
g. Drag-and-drop the photos into the template. Note that one
dimension or another will be cropped (since my original aspect ratio
does not equal 1113:1630). Zoom and or slide the image so that the
1113x1630 window frames an appropriate part of the image.
h. Note that the aspect ratio of the 1113x1630 template just doesn't
allow me to crop/compose the image the way I would like.
i. Find another template for the vertical shot. How about 1488x2475?
Just use it on its own and save the horizontals for another page?
j. Go back to Lightroom, re-export with new resizing parameters....
k. Repeat 1-3 times for each of the other pages.
It really is not as bad as it sounds, flipping back and forth between
Lightroom and Booksmart. But if the images were on Smugmug, do you
need to pull them back down to our system to work on them? Then
export back to Smugmug after you've resized? Then import from Smugmug
into Booksmart? Unless you have a very good strong fast connection, I
can see lots of coffee break time.
On the other hand, what I am describing is a book where the pages
vary quite a bit, partially on the theory that better shots deserve
more space (but the less good shots may still be required to tell the
story), partially on the theory that some variety in formatting from
page to page makes it less like an old-time photo album with four or
six same-size photos on each page, over and over... If you have one
consistent size photo, then much of the processing/resizing can be
done in batch.
stan
On Oct 1, 2008, at 9:51 PM, Stan Halpin wrote:
I did one (my Venice shots), helped my wife put one together (her
step-mother's 70th Barnard College reunion), and have just finished
editing a third (120 pages total, 375 images plus a bunch of text
to document our church's trip to Costa Rica this past June. Images
from 6 different people with six different types of cameras - I
decided not to get too fussy with exact color balance consistency
or I would never finish the beast!)
I find their templates too restrictive, their text handling to be
primitive (in short, it hoovers), and many of the details like
backgrounds and borders and captions and headers/footers are
somewhere between a royal pain and totally impossible to work with.
Having said that, the quality is good. If your project doesn't
demand too much, it is a good source. If you like everything to be
just right, all of the text to line up, etc., you'll do a lot of
fiddling.
On balance, I will continue to use it for the several projects on
my to-do list.
stan
On Sep 29, 2008, at 9:33 AM, ann sanfedele wrote:
I was browsing around smugmug stuff for their calendar prices
(looks like they stopped offering those) and came up
with a page on BLURB for making books - Anyone here try it?
ann
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
[email protected]
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
