There is a lot of SATISFACTION in the forums
As with most aspects of life, you tend to hear more in these forums from people that have complaints and less so from people who are satisfied. Human nature I guess. But there have been quite a few recent posts from people are are happy with their book. Now I’d like to add my name to that list! I’m absolutely gob smacked at the quality. Being somewhat nervous about the quality having read most of the recent postings in these forums I decided to do a trial book first. So I did the first 20 pages of my book and used the opportunity to trial different fonts, font sizes, repeat the same full-bleed page developed in Photoshop exported both as jpeg and dng to compare the text. I had already calibrated my monitor and, for interest, I softproofed some of the photos using the Indigo colour profile but left others as they were. The book is an 11" x 13" hardcover and records my trip to Ecuador including the Galapagos Islands and the Mindo Cloud Forest in the Andes near Quito. It is (or will be when I finish it) mainly about the wildlife, but some travelogue as well. I uploaded last Monday night, got the order confirmation Tuesday, the book was completed and shipped Friday and it arrived first thing this morning (Tuesday), so just 7 days from upload to opening the package. The only downside was that the UPS tracking number given in the shipping notification e-mail wasn’t the one on the package, so I got a nice surpise when it arrived this morning. It was well packaged in a thick cardboard shell, Amazon style, there was no damage to the book. The book itself is well made, it is stitched, there are no loose pages, no printing problems that I can seeand the dustjacket looks great. My photos have come out much better than I was expecting. So far I cannot tell the difference between those I soft-proofed and those I didn’t, they all look great, I’ll take a closer look this evening and do a detailed comparison. They even manage to make me look like a good photographer :-) I had read that some people found their photos coming out darker than they expected, I found that not to be the case, probably as I calibrate my monitor once a week and am careful with the lighting in the room when I’m working on the photos. When softproofing I found that some greens (plant leaves) were showing as out-of-gamut. I adjusted some photos and not others but all look good on the page. I will probably check for out-of-gamut in the rest of my photos but unless it highlights large areas of the photo as such I will probably leave them as they are. The book was produced using BookSart’s Darkroom theme and the black pages really show of the photos well. So I’m going to stick with that theme for the final book. I used white lettering which looks great, I still can’t make up my mind on which font/font size to use though, they all turned out well. On the pages using BookSmart’s templates both the serif and non-serif fonts look great, 9-point is a quite readable size. On the pages I created in Photoshop I think the sans-serif have the edge, though it took a really close look to compare the quality. The text in the pages saved a .PNG are noticeably sharper than those saved a .JPEG, but if they were not side-by-side in a two page spread I wouldn’t have seen the JPEG variant as having problems. Again the smallest font I used was 9-point. All-in-all I am definately a SATISFIED customer :-) I now have the confidence to start on the rest of the book, so what will I do differently? Probably do more page layouts in Photoshop, BookSmart’s templates will probably meet most of my needs but I would like room for a few more lines of text in some of the photo captions. I’d like room to say something about Blue Footed Boobies, not just put the name. Do some more photos that flow across two pages, they look stunning. I did not get the sizing of the overlap due to the gutter quite right so I’ll make use of the templates generously provided by Robin (rlmaly), They were not available when I started. http://forums.blurb.com/forums/4/topics/2042 Thank you Blurb! And an especiall big thank you to those of you in the forums who have shared your experiences (good and bad) and answered my questions. The success of this book is very much down to the lessons I have learnt from you. ......Tony
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