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guest book
Tips and Tricks
You might try creating a page of lines in Paint or other graphic program, saving it as a jpeg, and then bringing it into a fell bleed page in Booksmart and see how it looks.
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Poor Quality !
General Interest
It am sure I will offend some people with this but I could not hold my tongue. It is truly amazing to me the complaints about the quality of Blurb. I made a simple book of a car show with a good quality camera. The people that have seen it (including me) were awed by the quality of the images. People who hope they are the world’s next undiscovered artistic genius and are so consumed by the subtle differences in shading, color nuances and tonal balances need to realize that these books cost less than a good pair of shoes or a fair bottle of wine! You get what you pay for and for what you pay they are fantastic! I have noticed great differences in the appearance of the books just viewing them on different computers. What we see on the screen, what our home printers show us, what we envision and what comes out of the printer in some distant land has to different. There is no way around it . If every color, every shade, every contrast has to be perfect so you will get recognized and sell millions, step up and pay the price the big boys charge. Then you can review pre-press samples hours on end until they get it the way you want it. Meanwhile the rest of us "common folk" are thrilled at the quality, service and price that the kind people at Blurb provide us with.
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How did they do that?
Tips and Tricks
If you compose/group the pictures you want on one page in Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, etc. and then export or save it as a jpeg, Book Smart sees that jpeg as one image that you can place as a full bleed in the book.
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1st Book just received
General Interest
My first book just arrived today. The response so far has been fantastic. "how’d you do that?, "That’s awesome!" etc. etc. First off, I am a total amateur photographer with a pretty good 8 mp Canon camera. I took a lot of pictures of a Mustang event that had some famous race car drivers in it and put it together in a book. I managed to combine a few images in Corel Draw and Photoshop and save them as a jpeg so they all printed as one picture. I did not do any digital enhancements, color matching or any other high tech tweaky stuff, just stuck the pictures in the program, did some typing and hit the publish program. I was totally blown away by the quality of the images and the construction of the book. The owner of the dealership where the event was held took one look and ordered 20 on the spot and I did the whole thing just for fun! If I had more experience in the proper way to take pictures (lighting, exposure, etc.) it would have been more professional, but for a quick (submitted on Monday-shipped Friday same week) 40 page photo journal of an event by a beginner, I could not be more pleased. The guys complaining about loss of tonal quality, exact color matching, etc. need to go spend a couple of grand at some of the other sites and leave this one to the folks who just want good looking books without having to be a techno nerd to get them. I would like to see a little thicker/glossier pages if I ever do it again (my wife is now talking dog book, family history, etc.) but for the price you can’t beat it. Thank you! Thank you! T hank you! Blurb!
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Why must I buy a book before it can be published?
General Interest
I am still working on my first book but I am somewhat confused by all the rants about buying your own book. So here’s a book company and you want to send them a massive file of your images, have them format them and prepare them for printing, pay someone (i’m sure more than minimum wage) to post photos and all the information about your book on their website. Then they maintain the site and market your book so that someone, someday might stumble across the website and jump at the chance of owning a book about Aunt Harriet’s vacation in 2004 or a maybe my pet poodle with some more out of focus vacation sunset photos from Hawaii? We all think our books are world class but if they were we would be giving them to our publisher to send to Barnes and Noble by the case load. Somehow the business logic of asking a small start-up company like Blurb to front all the time and expense so we might get lucky and sell one or two, defies good business logic. In the case of needing to publish a second one because the first one had errors, wouldn’t you really want to own one that had no errors in it to show to prospective buyers or friends? Ok, said my piece, now back to work on "the world’s finest photo book ever created by man"
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Image Size
BookSmart
I posted this in error in general topics earlier so am reposting it here. I have searched the forums but still confused on the whole image size, dpi, thing. I am very new to photography so please bear with me if this is a "dumb" question. When I click on "get photos" and get my photos from my files, the photos appear in the folder on the left. If I drag the cursor over them, most show a size of 3264/2448 while a few show sizes of 7617/5713, 5642/4238, 5208/2798 etc. The larger ones are two or more photos combined in Corel Draw and exported to file as a jpeg. When I drag and drop these images to the pages (using pages with boxes, no full bleed) they look fine after I use the zoom/crop tool to get them to fit the boxes. Does this mean that the zoom/crop tool has reduced the image size/dpi etc., appropriately so that it will print ok when it is sent to the printer at Book Smart? I have printed a few pages and they look fine but am worried about the BookSmart instructions regarding maximum image size. Thanks for your help.
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