Pages are printing out low resolution! I need a good copy to proof
I am a graphic designer and I followed blurbs instructions on how to import my InDesign files into BookSmart. The first proof that my client printed, the resolution was fine. Now when I try to print the corrected version on my Epson, its blurry and unreadable. I only have 1 more day to get this done. Can someone please please help!!
I followed these instructions below, among other instructions I found from the blog.
Hi Gena,
Thanks for writing us at Blurb!
Please make sure the images meet the following criteria:
1) JPG or PNG format (no TIFFs)
2) RGB or grayscale color (no CMYK)
3) Are saved on your hard drive and not on an external drive
4) If you’re using iPhoto, that the library has its default name and is saved in its default location
5) The images have no ICC/color profiles attached, nor any tags, such as keyword descriptions of the pictures.
6) Please be sure that no images are saved as 16-bit files. 8-bit is the default, and you wil probably know if you have save any images as 16-bit. If so, please change those back to 8-bit files.
7) Between 150-300dpi. Images should be between 150-300 dpi (dots per inch or pixels per inch). For instance, a 5×7 image frame should be filled with an image that is at least 750×1050 pixels and no greater than 1500-2100 pixels.
Best Regards,
Milisa
Blurb Customer Support
Blurb.com/Help
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I also made a pdf and it is low resolution as well. Horrible actually. How is my client supposed to proof this? He cannot open the file on his computer. It was his idea to use BookSmart not mine.
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Unfortunately it seems that Blurb prints out in low-res for proofing purposes – something that they don’t bother to tell you.
And I agree – it makes the whole idea of printing it out to proof absolutely pointless.
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Hi, Let me see if I can clear some of this up. For those unhappy with our low-res proofs, here’s the why behind it. BookSmart creates a working low-resolution version of your books for proofing purposes. BookSmart does this to speed up the editing process, otherwise the files would slow the process down to a crawl. Rest assured: When you upload your book to be published, BookSmart will use the high-resolution images.
Blurb exists to help you create and print books, not digital files. Keeping a light watermark on your printed proof and providing low-res, not high-res proofs is our way of supporting the process of bookmaking rather than filemaking. Of course, if you used low-res photos in BookSmart, you’d get a warning, and your proofs would reflect the low-res photos. For professionals needing to show a proof to a client: We often recommend printing a version of the book as your proof, but if that is not an option, it will probably help to explain to your clients that you’re showing them a low-resolution print out. You can also have your client download BookSmart and view the book on screen. Here’s a blog post that explains how. And finally, because of feedback from the Forum community, we are looking into adding a message in BookSmart along the lines of "You are in Preview Mode. BookSmart uses low resolution in this mode and for proofing. Your high-resolution images will be used when printing your book." Hat tip to Martin for the suggestion. Hope that helps, everyone. – Kathy
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Hi Kathy,
I’m a fine art photographer. Your service is very good and I’ve used it for prototyping a variety of books and organizing my work—I’m a happy camper, in fact I just posted another book and put in another order. Everyone loves to get a book I’ve printed on Blurb! Kudos to every one on your team!
I’m going to give you some advice that should help your user community and help you sell more books at the same time, so please take this the right way—I really do love you guys.
I have to disagree with you on the way your company handles the preview. I understand you are probably trying to “protect your software investment” and make it hard for a competitor to use it. Please hear me out…
First, I need to quickly see a high quality proof on my printer <del>- it would be ideal to print it here because I could check things on the spot before I upload to Blurb. Yes, I could show a client a low rez version of the book, but that gives them a very bad impression of Blurb and makes me look lame. Even when you tell them the quality is better, they can’t see how good it will be with their own eyes. Yes, I understand this kind of output is slow, but an hour of computer time, plus another hour of printing is acceptable, especially compared to the five days it takes to print and ship back a copy from Blurb. Many of us have high quality printers -</del> but don’t worry, Blurb is a bargain compared to the cost of ink jet paper and ink – you’d have to be crazy to try to print anything but a proof yourself! And when you go through a couple of revisions, Blurb just isn’t going to work for that because we don’t want to wait for three weeks of back and forth to get it right.
Second, I need a good preview .pdf I can post on my web site (and on Blurb, too) that shows ALL the pages, 15 pages is a joke (sorry)—you get the cover, the title page, the copyright page, a couple of “bumper” pages and about two pictures. Lower rez is OK (just lower the jpeg quality and make the book a bit smaller) for this, because I don’t want the download to be more than a couple of MB. I’d like to show people the whole book and invite them to get a Blurb paper copy.
So here’s my suggestion; let the user decide the resolution to output the document and the number of pages and let them generate this on their local computer so I they can post this to a web site, make quick proofs and get an order into Blurb. Put your ads in the front and back, with a link to the sales page on Blurb for the book <del>- that protects your software from a competitor. In fact, put a small blurb logo on the bottom right of every page with a link as well. I WANT this link, as long as it’s not obtrusive -</del> it will help get my book out there and sell more copies.
One other quick suggestion… Please make a longer description field available for each book (a Blurb on our book) and make it searchable on your site AND GOOGLE. You’ll drive a ton of traffic to your users books (and sell more books because people can find them).
Hope this helps, CK
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Well said, CK.
A few additions:
“For professionals needing to show a proof to a client: We often recommend printing a version of the book as your proof, but if that is not an option, it will probably help to explain to your clients that you’re showing them a low-resolution print out. You can also have your client download BookSmart and view the book on screen. Here’s a blog post that explains how.”
Asking a customer to pay for a copy of the book as a proof is nothing but a cheap way of making more money – however you want to spin it.
And if Blurb wants to elevate itself above something like Snapfish’s book-printing services then it needs to sort out a hi-res print-out preview asap: you can’t claim to be a service for “high-end art books” and then expect users and clients to work from basically useless low-res print proofs. Yes, you can broadly see that you’ve placed a heading or title two-thirds of the way down the page on-screen, but the kind of proper and accurate proofing people need to do doesn’t work on-screen (and this is a crucial stage as there’s obviously a lack of quality control over the actual printing due to the way books are out-sourced).
“And finally, because of feedback from the Forum community, we are looking into adding a message in BookSmart along the lines of “You are in Preview Mode. BookSmart uses low resolution in this mode and for proofing. Your high-resolution images will be used when printing your book.”
That will be great, though why it wasn’t there from the start seems a major oversight (ditto customer service staff apparently not knowing about the low-res print preview issue – I’ve had about six responses on the issue when I emailed and not one mentioned it).
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The criteria mentioned in the initial post mostly don’t relate to the question of quality of proofs. Here’s why:
If you managed to get the images into BookSmart so they looked reasonable on the screen, and are at the point of printing a proof, then clearly all of these criteria have been met:
“1) JPG or PNG format (no TIFFs)”
—since, you can’t import anything else into BookSmart
“2) RGB or grayscale color (no CMYK)”
—since they show up as all black if you do (at least for me).
“4) ... iPhoto … library has its default name …”
—since if it weren’t, you couldn’t have imported ‘em
I don’t think these two criteria are even true:
“3) ... not on an external drive”
—I can’t imagine why this makes any difference. The images are all copied into the book data folder when you use them. Surely it proofs off the images that are in the book data folder, since those are the ones that will be part of the book.
“5) The images have no ICC/color profiles attached…”
—As many other posts in the forum indicate, and as is clear from using BookSmart, it completely ignores the any ICC profile information. Even if, for some odd reason, printing a local proof used the ICC info (while every other operation of the program ignores it), it still wouldn’t result in proofs with poor resolution, just shifted colors.
This leaves only:
“6) ... no images are saved as 16-bit files”
—I couldn’t test this, but I bet this is in the first camp. I’d bet you can’t even get a 16-bit image into BookSmart, or if you can, it shows up obviously wrong on your screen.
“7) Between 150-300dpi.”
—Sure, this is a criteria – though one BookSmart thoughtfully checks for you and informs you if you don’t meet it. If you reviewed your book at all, you’d already know if you had images with too low a ppi.
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Really, the heart of the matter is that the PDF generation process BookSmart uses creates artificially low-res versions for proofing. It shouldn’t. Kathy gives two reasons why they do, and I they are both suspect:
1) “It would slow to a crawl” I think Kathy is confusing the issue of “Preivew Book” mode, where things are shown on the screen, and printing a proof. For display mode, sure, I see why it uses lower res versions. But for printing, using the full-res versions would not slow things down anymore thany anyone used to working with hi-res images would expect during printing.
2) ”... our way of supporting the process of bookmaking rather than filemaking” I think it is clear that supporting bookmaking should involve hi-resolution proofs. I think the unstated reason here is that Blurb seems in fear that people will download BookSmart and use it to produce something other than books printed on Blurb.
This strikes me as a most misdirected fear: First, were that BookSmart were so good of a page layout program that anyone would want to use it to create PDFs for other purposes! Second, so what if they do? It is their content. Rather than lock it up, I’d think you’d do far better to let people use it – since the path of least resistance to creating a real book is going to be that one click in the program. So what if I want to upload the whole book as a PDF to my website? So what I want to print a full-res proof on my printer? And really, so what if send the PDF off to a competitor to print (not that they even support the specific page sizes, bindings, etc….)? Relax Blurb: drop the artificial lo-res restrictions, and drop the silly watermark.
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