Blurb Forums

Well, actually, it is known issue around BookSmart application. It is just that it can’t "interpret" high quality format of Photoshop JPG into BookSmart application.

 I had similar issue around fuzzy and jazzy text appeared in BookSmart after imported over 170 images from Adobe InDesign/Photoshop. And I had successfully uploaded the finished book. As it turned out that printed book looks really nicely done.

I don’t know what else you did with your photos in Photoshop. You need to make sure that your photos looks nice – if you have done some soft proof all of your images in Photoshop.

 When you say "small text size", I am not sure how small size did you set in Photoshop. Can you confirm this about the size and type of font did you used? I can let you know about what size and what font style I have used in InDesign application. I can’t remember the exact size of font set in InDesign document. I’ll take a look at it sometime tomorrow. And get this back to you.

I am curious what version of Photoshop are you working with? I work with Adobe Design Premium CS3 on Macintosh (OSX, Leopard version). 

I did a test book earlier this year, including pages where I tried various fonts and various sizes. I did that using a booksmart template, then did a full-bleed page in Photoshop, exported as JPEG and exported again as.PNG.

The text entered directly into BookSMart came out well whatever the size or font.

The text imported as a JPEG was a little fuzzy at the smallest sizes, especially when it was a serif font. Bold came out better than normal. The text on tthe same pages imported as .PNG was better, it showed particularly when I had the JPEG and PNG pages side by side.

JPEG (the Joint PHOTOGRAPHIC Expert Group standard) is what is called a lossy format. In compressing the images it throws information away in the image, for photographs that is usually OK, if you look a a blue sky for instance do you really need to store each and every pixel, or would it be OK to lose a few to save space and recreate them by averaging from the surrounding ones when it comes to redisplay the photo (though the maths is a actually a lot more complex than averaging). So if you DO decide to use JPEG make sure you use it at the highest quality (say level 12) which will involve least compression.

.PNG is a lossless standard, details of each and every pixel can be faithfully recreated, you get a bigger file size but you do not get the loss of fine detail or get the “jaggies” that can occur with JPEG.

For my own books I have decided, where I am creating pages in Photoshop not to use a font smaller than 8, not to use a serif font smaller than 10 and to import via PNG rather than JPEG.

Bear in mind also that the preview that BookSmaty gives you on your display, or if you do a local print, is a low quality image, that is done (they say) to keep file sizes down thus response time better. Your final book will look better than the preview.

.........Tony