Red scissor lines, pink zones

I am also confused because the red scissor line is supposed to indicate where the page will be cut. The idea of the pink zone seems to be that Blurb is covering its options just in case the page wasn’t actually cut at the red line in case of customer complaints. Point is, when you want a full bleed, where should we put the edge of the image. If we put it to the inside edge of the pink zone, top, left, bottom and right, will we still get a full bleed?

I find the FAQs on this very helpful, so if you haven’t already I’d recoomednd you read them.

I have designed  6 books now and have had around 15 copies printed with no trim problems and my interpretation, based on those books, is as follows.

Trimming is a mechanical process and accuracy and repeatability is not guaranteed. I don’t believe this is just weasel words on behalf of Blurb to cover its options, but  simple statement of fact. The FAQs state that UP TO 1/4" MAY be trimmed from the outside edges of the pages.

 So what do I do?

I take the scissor lines as the MOST LIKELY trim point, but  not a guarantee that that is where the trim will actually take place.

I take the pink area as a guide as to where the trim MIGHT take place.

So how to guarantee that the resultant page will not have a white margin, however small, on any of the edges?

Firstly make sure that your image goes RIGHT TO THE EDGE of the full-bleed page. That way, when the trim takes place, there is no likleyhood at all of getting that dreaded white border.

Then you must assume that a small part of that image WILL BE TRIMMED. So I make sure that no critical part of the image (i.e the top of somebody’s head) is within 1/4" of the edge of that image, that is where the pink guidelines are useful.

So far, adopting this strategy has proved successful.

….Tony

The image is not printed right to the edge of the page on the gutter side so there is a very slight white strip that is hidden by the binding. (I took obe of my books apart when I had problems with some two page spreads).

I have found that the more pages the more is lost in the gutter. For a 40 page book I do not allow for any overlap, for a (approx) 150 page book I allowed a 1/4" overlap and that worked O.K.

Have a read of this thread and you will see other people’s experiences with this issue.

…..Tony

Hi Deb,

it isn’t something that you can easily do in BookSmart or Bookify, you need to prepare the left hand image and the right hand image in Photoshop, adding the overlap there, and then import those two images into two full-blled pages. You cannot easily use this technique with BookSmart’s new two-page spread template.

If you have photoshop and want more information on how to do this come back and I’ll go into detail, if you have Photoshop CS or Version 7 onwards let us know.  Mike, a member of these forums, has a nifty program that will create PS templates to help you do this (my understaning is that it doesn’t work with Elements) and he’ll probably chime in with details for you.

…..Tony

Hi again Deb.

You’ll find Mike’s program here, I’m sure he won’t mind me pointing you directly at his site. A search of the forums for ps2blurb will let you see his posts on this program and people’s experiences of using it. If you are not used to setting up Photoshop presets I’d highly recommend his program, it is very easy to use and very effective.

 This post gives some people’s experiences of how much overlap is required in the gutter.

I can’t find my post on the way I use Photoshop to do this (I had set up a series of Crop presets for this before Mike’s program was available) so will need to document it again, but as I an off out for the evening shortly I’ll have to do that tomorrow morning. Sorry!

…..Tony

No worries Tony, I played around with the PS templates. I sent the book to be printed last night. I’m sure it won’t be perfect but that will be a good starting point as far as what adjustments need to be made. Thanks so much to you both for your precious help ;)

Deb