Photobook complaint

I ordered my parent wedding albums from you (my wedding photographer recommended blurb company over all the others) and I was really not pleased with the books I got.

The quality of the standard paper is thin and flimsy. The pictures are faded/dull in color and almost looks like they printed out of a normal home color printer (some pics have lines). I know the pics are high quality and print well because I printed the same album from shutterfly and the pics are bright and vibrant and the book is gorgeous. I don’t think it’s a manufacture defect in which I can return the books because all 5 books that I ordered turned out that way! I also don’t think it’s user error, because a.) I can’t make the paper flimsy and b.) the pics are fine in the shutterfly album I printed plus they are professional photos from my wedding.

On a different note, I personally think that booksmart is not very user friendly. Not everyone knows how to use photoshop and cannot design their own fancy album in there. But I still wanted an easy to use tool to build my album and also have some creative design options as well – such as using a picture as a background or maybe decorative things such as banners.Another reason why I prefered shutterfly. I had to keep my shutterfly album more simple so it could be as simple as the blurb album. 

Anyways, it was partly my fault for ordering 5 albums instead of 1 test album as recommended. I found a 15% off coupon and I wanted to make sure that I could use it on all the books before it expire – I also wanted to save on shipping costs. 

I suppose there isn’t much that can be done, if I could find a place to review the company not on this website I would’ve done that instead. I emailed my photographer right away and let her know that she may want to do another book trial since she is recommending your company to her clients, because my experience with blurb was not great. 

 -Catherine

Hi Catherine, I’m just another author here at Blurb. Did you create the book yourself? There are any number of reasons you can have quality problems, but I think most fall into a few categories that you (or the author) might want to investigate:

1. Conversion between formats. One example would be if you converted an image in a RAW format to a smaller image, then upsized that image to a larger one, using a smaller bit depth. There are so many possibilities between this one.

2. Resolution. You need a high enough resolution to convey all the color information in the image. If you used a 72 dpi resolution, for example, it’s not going to look very good. I assume all images are 300 dpi (though you can refine this if you know exactly what the resolution of the book is—often for printing, it is 240 dpi.

3. Color space. This is where a lot of people get messed up. If you have an image in RGB or CMYK, or some other format, and the publisher needs it in another format, then you will definitely have color problems.

4. Calibration of your monitor. If your colors look okay on your monitor, and you print them and they look awful, most often it is because your monitor is not producing the same color as your print/book.

You should be able to research any of these topics either here or elsewhere on the net. The fact that the book turned out okay on another service, could just be luck that your images were in the correct format for that service, but not for Blurb. ~ Axel