Custom template & two page photo spread tutorials

I recently received my Blurb book and I love it!  I created all my own pages using Photoshop and I’ve had a ton of people asking me how I did that.  So I wrote two tutorials in my blog that I thought people on this board would be interested in. 

Here’s the post about how to create your own album templates.

Here’s the post about how to put a photo across the gutter of a page.

I’ve received a lot of help from these forums (especially with the soft proofing) and so I wanted to offer help to others.  Below are some pictures of how my book turned out.  For people’s reference it’s a 276 page 13×11" hardcover book.  

Let me know if you have any questions!

That’s a good idea, thanks! 

But judging by the lack of responses I don’t know if people on these forums would care.

I’m sure that people would be interested. I have your tutorials printed out at pinned to the wall above the mnitor!

 Great looking book. All the techincal skills in the world don’t give a would-be author the immagination that I have seen in many of the books I have seen in the fourms – your book is very impressive.

Well if people are interested I can make some templates available.  But I’ll probably make them for all the different sizes of books so that everyone can use them.

My only question is what file type should I save them in?  I have Photoshop CS2 (CS3 is ready to be installed) so can people with other types of Photoshop open a .psd file saved in CS2?  I know there is a way to export files from InDesign to be able to open them in previous versions but I’m not sure about Photoshop.

Robin.  Thanks for taking the time to do the tutorials.  I was impressed by the detail you put into the tutorials.  The graphics were great too and made it much easier to follow.  I look forward to seeing your templates. 

Robin,

I would think that your detailed information about gutter set up in Photoshop is a brilliant idea. I am currently in middle of other book project about recent Mexican Riviera cruise trip with 3,560 raw images taken with my dSLR camera.

I have Adobe CS3 Premium package on my end.

I have a suggestion that you might want to add .25 inch for “safe” gutter inside the book, especially with text – so that text won’t be cut off along with 1/8 inch (or .125”) cut off edge.

Do you work with InDesign app, no? I do work with InDesign a lot.

Brian,

I also have CS3 Premium but I haven’t installed it yet so I’m still on CS2 Premium.  I do work with InDesign from time to time but I’m much more familiar with Photoshop.  I was originally going to use both Photoshop and InDesign for my Blurb layouts but decided to do it all in Photoshop since I would have to go back through it anyways.  I was nervous about how my text would turn out but was very happy with the final product.  I used a white sans serif typeface on a black background in 14 point so it is larger than most people probably use.  I just thought the larger size fit the scale of the book better in my practice prints. 

Thanks for the suggestion.  I’ll add some safe guides in the center.  For my size of book (276 pages) though I used a 1/4" gutter on each page or a 1/2" total gutter which ended up working out very well.  I would think that if I had made a book with fewer pages that I would need to use the recommended 1/8" gutter on each page.  I wish there were some guidelines on this in respect to book size and type.

Tom,

Thanks so much!  I must have been thinking about giffs or something.  I’m going to get working on those templates.

 Robin

THANK YOU for the tutorials! Great work and so easy to follow.

Thanks Robin for your timely response.  I just put in my book order and will anxiously wait to see the results.  Since my book (10" x 8") has only 22 pages, I used the 1/8" trim guide for the gutter and did not add the additional 1/8" safety guide.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.   

Good idea Orchids.  I just received my returned book back today (the first one had spots on two of the pages) and am slightly disappointed with it.  The margins didn’t line up like they did on the first copy.  It’s only really noticeable on a few pages but still annoying.

I will have a full review shortly with pictures of the differences between the two books. 

Andyb9 if you mean the tutorials there are links in the original post.  But if you mean actual downloadable templates they will be on my blog shortly.  I have all of the templates done but I’m working on the "How to use these" guide and on how to get zip files on a blog that doesn’t support them.  (I think I have a work around though) 

I’ll make a new post when I have it all finished.