Blurb Forums

I am so pleased with the colour!

I have just received my very first blurb book. In short, I am absolutely delighted.

I was very worried, as after reading through these forums, I expected to receive a book full of badly printed images with dull colours. But this is absolutely not the case. My hardback 8"x10" book has 140 pages of really well printed colour photography. And a fantastic dust jacket!

I didn’t follow all the colour profiling rules discussed in other forum topics, as I didn’t understand them. I took all my images at 10megapixels on a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50. I downloaded them and left them all as ‘RGB’. I did a quick tweak to each – increasing the contrast by between 10% and 15% in Photoshop, judging it by eye on my iBook (which doesn’t  have a colour-calibrated screen).

Then I put them all into Blurb and hit ‘order’ and hoped for the best. I got it. 

Just wanted to share this with anyone who uses a similar model camera, or who is nervous about giving the service a go after reading all the posts about colour.

Benjamlee,

 Well, I am glad that your first book working out nicely and exceptionally well for you, Ben.

I have been constantly fine-tuning and working on my three books, not yet uploaded to Blurb.

Finally, color is very important for me. I am very fussy about this issue. Also with quality issue. Other than that, once again, I am happy for you that you are pleased with your first book.

Cheers, Brian 

Hello Worldcrzr,

I did not resize the images at all. My files were 3648×2736 pixels – a little larger than blurb’s recommended size for a 10×8 book. My original camera files downloaded at around 3mb each, however the ones I adjusted the contrast of in Photoshop ended up being around 7mb each.

The full bleed images did get cropped a little when the book cut – but it is normal to lose some of the edge of each image as ‘bleed’ whatever printing process you are using. I was worried as some of my images were cropped to be perfectly central, and I was worried about losing some of the image down one side. But this outside edge trim actually matched the amount of image lost to the glue binding on the inside edge, so the subjects I photographed remained central in each image.

Hope this all helps! Ben