Blurb Forums

1. I’m afraid you can’t..

2. This usually happens when the proportions of the photo are not the same as the proportions of the container on the page.

When you say you resized them what exactly did you do? Did you crop the photos to ensure they were the right proportions for the particular container? Or did you just specify the pixel or inch size of the container. If you did the latter your photo editor probably constrained that resizing to the original proportions of the photo to ensure that there was no distortion.

If you try to fit a 6" x 4" photo into a 6" x 8" container Blurb has two options, either expand the 4" side to 8" (x2), in which case to stop distorting the photo it has to expand the 6" side also by x2 to 12". In which case you will lose half of the photo.

It;s alternative is to leave the photo at 6" x 4" in which case there will be a lot of white space in the container to the left and to the right of the photo (if you centred it).

If you don’t want either of these things to happen you need to crop your original photo to the proportions of the container (6:8 or 3:4 in the above case) and in doing that you decide during the crop which parts of the photo you are willing to exclude.

........Tony

Hi Sherry;

Just to expand on Tony’s response to your q’s…

1. Background; although you can’t (currently) import custom BGs into BookSmart, the program itself does have a whole variety of backgrounds that you can apply to different sections, or even different pages if you wish…

NOTE: this is different from selecting "Themes" which is applied to the WHOLE book…

In the BookSmart workspace, click on the Backgrounds option and in the drop-down box you will see an option to "customise" patterns. Click on that; there’s a whole slew of options in there, and then you can also change the foreground & background colours to suit as well…

That may give you some of what you’re looking for… These can be applied to individual pages…

2. Re-sizing; Just in case you don’t know – you DO NOT have to fill the image container! Any "un-used" portions of the container just blend into the background on printing…

TOP TIP: When using any of the re-sizing tools in PSE6 – ensure that the "Resample Image" box is UN-checked! Otherwise you run the risk of losing valuable image data…

Good luck;

Cheers;

Lee