Lightroom Plugin: Exactly what export settings does it use??

This question can most likely only be answered by Blurb staff, unless anyone else knows the inner workings of the plugin or has done some testing…

As there are no user definable export settings available in the LR booksmart plugin, what settings does the plugin apply to the images when published?

—What output sharpening settings?
—What re-sizing, if any?
—What jpg compression and quality?
—What colorspace?

Even if we are not told all the specifics above, the underlying question is does the LR/Plugin/Booksmart truly optimize images for Blurb books, or do we just have random settings that we will never be able to determine?

Hopefully blurb staff will provide some basic info.

Thanks

Mine is a general question applicable to all users. The forum is perfectly appropriate for that.
Naturally I did contact blurb support when posted. I have received no reply.
Blurb staff periodical replies to forum posts. For a general interest question like this, they should reply here (in addition to my support ticket).
Actually, this info should be published in Blurbs help directory, but isn’t. The forum is the next most public place for questions and answers.

I am also very interested in this.

I was able to locate where the plugin deposited the images in the ‘Library’ and do a bit of inspection.  They appear to be the same pixel dimension as the original … so there is no down-sizing going on.  But the question of compression and colour space is relevant.  I bet the colour space conversion is sRGB … that’s the most reasonable.

But the big ticket item is output sharpening…whcih I used extensively in my ‘old’ workflow.  I would know the container size, output to the exact pixel dimensions and output sharpen for MATTE-high pretty much for all the paper types.

I would not like to lose this ability in the workflow.  I tried a convoluted setup where I collected my images into a collection, made my edits and exported with output sharpening and then pulled them back in to LR to hook into the Publish template for LR.  Not worth the effort as it was very convulted and that essentially this breaks the ability to make an edit and have it reflected in the book.

So, please post any reponse you get to your ticket

The fact that the LR pug in doesn’t allow to set the size of the picture it makes it useless for me. I’ve learnt from test books I made that it is essentially important to set the pixel size exactly to the size of the picture box in the book. Every picture which was bigger looked worse downsized, no matter whether it was downsized 200 % or just 30 %. Funnywise upsizing is not needed, a picture upsized 50 percent in the book doesn’t look different from the one with the perfect pixel count.

Luckiliy chosing the pixel count by exporting from LR is very easy.

Nik

Are you saying that if BookSmart has to scale down an image from 3000×2000 to say 1800×1200 that it will do a poor job and introduce artifacts in the printed version?

This would make the LR plugin worse than worthless as it would be easier to manually export each photo and scale it yourself. The plugin has no settings to scale or resample. Surely down-scaling algorithms are far more simple to do well than up-scaling.

I use LR3 on Mac. I am almost ready to upload my first book to Blurb. But I have done no photo scaling to match the dimensions of picture boxes in the book and all of my photos are 240 DPI.

Are you telling me I have to manually rescale every photo before I upload the book or risk a bad printed result?

This is hard to believe. Please let me know so I dont waste $90 on a junky book.