On Friday, I finally gave my mother her Chanukah present—a 20-page book of photos I took on our cruise and bus tour of Alaska in 2009. She had printed off all of my blog posts about Alaska as a keepsake, and this seemed like a far better answer.
It only took me about 2.5 weeks to make the book once I started (with, admittedly, a bunch of late nights of obsessive photo editing), and perhaps a week and a half to receive it from Apple’s production house in Oregon once I ordered it. But it took me an additional month to get over my nasty, nasty virus sufficiently so that I could drive up to give the book to Mom. Hence, Chanukah in February.
That accomplished, I thought that some of you might enjoy seeing the trip pulled together in a 20-page picture book, and some of you might be curious about my iPhoto/Apple bookmaking experience.
For those who want to see the book, a slide show version is now available on YouTube (or here):
(Or friends can visit me at my place to see one of the two existing copies.) I took some of the photos on an old 2005-ish 4.2-megapixel digital Sony point-and-shoot camera, and others on disposal film cameras that I used while rafting and canoeing, which subsequently got developed and digitized at the drugstore (so those are not of very good quality).
The iPhoto bookmaking experience was, in a word, wonderful: I would recommend it to anyone who isn’t a professional designer (and owns a Mac, of course). I have InDesign, and I know how to use it (sort of), and, theoretically, I could have done the design work with that (and looked for a printer that would bind the book, but it would have been an overwhelming, tedious, time-consuming job. iPhoto took nearly all of the tedium out of the process. Basically, you import all your photos into iPhoto (if they’re not there already). You decide how many photos you want to put on a given page and then select one of several possible layouts for that number of photos. You drag and drop the photos into the page layout (eliminating the need for all sorts of tedious sizing work), and then you can easily make changes and perform basic photo editing tasks. Want to zoom in on a section of your image? Easy – do it in place without affecting the original photo or needing to save under a new name. Want to swap the locations of two photos on a page? Drag and drop one of them to the new position, and the two are transposed. Want to change the number of pictures on a page after your selection? Very doable – although you’ll lose some of the zooming and positioning work you did on photos on that page before. Need to straighten a photo? Do it in place with a slider button (no need to enter a % of rotation as in Photoshop and then adjust again and again until you get what you want).
You can easily make a couple dozen of the most common photo editing adjustments to the image (e.g., exposure, contrast, saturation, sharpness). Because there are only a limited range of choices, instead of the hundreds of options in Photoshop, it’s easier to play around and stumble upon the adjustment your image needs the most.
So I managed to improve the look of a number of photos that originally appeared here on the blog (of course, my summer photo editing course helped with that as well), and to improve and use a few photos of subjects I really wanted but didn’t post originally because I thought they just weren’t good enough.
The downside is that you don’t have total control of your layout. There are only so many options, and, occasionally, I wished I could size and arrange items differently on a page. But having infinite control, as in InDesign, is exactly what would have made the job overwhelming in my mind, and the default layouts that iPhoto forced me into no doubt save people from themselves on many occasions, as they follow basic design principles (e.g., only 1 or 2 axes on a page).
So, as the New Year rolled around, I was pleased indeed with my book design, but I was still concerned about what the print quality would be when I got the hard copy back. I’ve had plenty of experience doing one hour printing at the drug store and being disappointed in the color quality. And I’ve sent images to a professional printer and been surprised with how the color came back . Also, I knew that I had blown up some of the images from the disposable cameras to a pretty large size and that they weren’t high res enough to achieve a “professional quality” result in printing.
So I didn’t know what to expect as I was waiting for the book to get to me via ground transportation.
End result: I was delighted! The book is gorgeous. The print quality is great — and amazingly close to what I’m seeing when I look at the digital version on screen. Even the blown up lower res photos from the disposables look good (although not AS good as the digital camera photos, of course).
All that for $20 per copy of an 8.5 x 11 soft cover book, plus pretty typical shipping fees. And they offer books with smaller pages for even less money (down to around $4 per copy of their smallest book) or hard cover options and extra pages for some additional cash.
The only thing I’m at all second-guessing myself on (besides the page layout of the Juneau and Skagway to Haines page) is the choice of the soft cover. If I’d known the image quality would be so good, I probably would have sprung for the hard cover, as I’m concerned that the soft cover might not stand up to heavy use. (I wouldn’t want my 5-year-old nephew to handle it himself, for example). But my mom disagrees–she thinks the hard cover would be too much for 20 pages.
I guess I’ll find out when I make my next book.
