Makin' a photo book: tips?

I've had limited experience with Blurb, but I'd suggest the following:

- Get a test book. It's much easier to judge layout, etc. when you're holding the book in your hands.

- Spring for the heavier paper. It's much nicer.

- The image wrap covers are nice. I like them better than the dustjacket. One of mine had a slight delamination problem near the spine though.

As for colour management, I let my wife deal with that. It's nice to have a graphic designer in the house!
 
OK, so far so good...I've got a rough layout and have finished scanning and converting the titles (they were written in pencil, adjusted for contrast, and turned into bitmaps). I'm trying to get the pictures to speak to each other across the spread of two pages (in the first example below I was shocked to find that the first picture is geometrically almost identical to the second one, if you turn the second one 90 degrees counterclockwise)...I'm currently debating whether or not to include page numbers. One question, how do you get the exported pdf to display in spreads, rather than individual pages? (This is with InDesign.) I'd like the pdf user to benefit from the juxtaposition of images.

I'm essentially modeling the layout on one of my favorite photo books ever, William Eggleston's "The Democratic Forest"...I've also got Mark Steinmetz's "South East" here on the desk. I think I will write a very short essay or short story to include at the beginning, again written in pencil.

One problem I'm having...I haven't tried the Blurb pdf profile yet, but when I use the standard high-quality export settings, that picture of the trailer house with the blue sky gets messed up...in the pdf the sky is banded in color gradients. Not sure why that would be happening, but I will work it out. [EDIT: I turned off all downsampling during export and that fixed it.]

Here are some sample page spreads.

bookspread1.jpg


bookspread2.jpg


bookspread3.jpg
 
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And one weird thing...I hadn't looked at the Steinmetz book for a couple of weeks and I was certain it was mixed color and B&W. I distinctly remembered GREEN in it. But of course it's all B&W! A testament to his vision, he put color into my head with black and white film.
 
My, you've been a busy bee.

Nice spreads - I guess I'm not a big fan of mixing B& and color, so the second one is my favorite. But, while it okay to ask others about what they think of the mix, in the end it is you the artist who should go with your gut feeling.

In my opinion anyay!

Good luck and enjoy making the book.
 
Thanks! I am more interested in comments on the layout than on the content...although I'm curious what people might think of, say, those two bus stop photos. Obviously they are together because they both contain two people waiting, but perhaps this is too obvious a connection. The facial expressions make the juxtaposition more interesting, and those are rather hard to see at this resolution, but that's about as explicit as the connections get.
 
Message from Helen at Adorama Camera

Message from Helen at Adorama Camera

snausages said:
Have you considered Adorama's books? .......Someone brought an Adorama book to the last NYC RFF meet-up and the stock was really impressive.
Click to expand...

Thank you - I've passed your comments on to the team at AdoramaPix, who will be delighted.

These links may also be useful:


http://photocamel.com/forum/printing-matting-framing/74513-best-bang-buck-photo-books.html
http://sharpernewyork.blogspot.com/2009/07/print-on-demand-book-test-results.html


http://blog.photoshelter.com/corp/2009/09/making-an-awesome-photo-book-p.html


 
bob, those sample pages look great. I like all of frank petronio's advice. I've done a couple of blurb books. the paper quality and binding is really quite nice if you use the high quality paper. the image wrap and dust jacket covers are both nice. do not use their booksmart layout software. it's a little cumbersome and the registration of images on the page is little difficult to control with any high level accurcy. your use of big borders will eliminate that problem, but if you like smaller borders, you'll find some of your images cropped in strange places.

have fun and be sure to post a link when it's all done. I've done two of these. one as an elaborate birthday card to my wife and another as a wedding album as a favor and gift when the official photographer failed to produce anything. the printing was great. my layouts were amateurish, but in both cases I rushed myself because of deadlines. take your time.
 
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