Creating Photo Books – Don’t Make These Errors When You Design Your Book On Line

Making photo books online is a great way to show off your favorite photos. With more and more photo sites getting into photo book publishing, it doesn't take long to make a high quality photo book. I've made quite a few photobooks and as I became more skilled I discovered I was doing some things the hard way. It appears that I am not the only one, therefore I'm sharing my tips on how to make the process fast and easy.

Online Photobook Design Mistake No. 1: Not Uploading Enough Photos or Uploading Too Many.

I've had this problem on several occasions, I've been smack in the middle of making a book when I realized I didn’t have enough images for my layout and ended up wasting time searching for more photos. Likewise on occasion I have far too many and I have to make a choice whether to add pages, change my design or eliminate a few. The number of photos you will need will vary depending on the photo book size you selected and the page layouts/number of images per page that you chose.

IWhat You Should Do Instead - Before you begin, plan your page layout and review the images you plan to use. Decide how big a photo book you want to make (the cost depends on the number of pages). Are you thinking of using a couple images per page and making the book photo-focused? Thus at least 20 and up to 40 photos would be needed for a 20-page book. If you want to make some collage pages using 4 or 5 or more photos per page you will likely need 150 or more pictures. Planning ahead will save you a lot of time in the long run.

Online Photo Book Creation Mistake #2 - Not Editing Photos Before Uploading

Few photo book sites offer more than the most basic of editing tools. Just about always there is a crop tool, often a red-eye removal tool, and often a color tool for changing to black and white. Some photo book publishers will automatically make corrections for color/brightness/contrast when your book is printed. But if you don’t want that garbage can beside you in that otherwise stunning beach photo, or should you want to erase a big zit on your nose, the photo site's online tools are unlikely to help.

What You Should Do - Make All Changes in Your Image Editor Before You Upload Them. You'll be glad you did this. And it doesn’t have to cost a fortune, and it's not necessary to get Photoshop. You'll find many excellent, reasonably priced image editing programs offered for well under a hundred bucks, and several are free or may already be on your PC. Two programs I really like are Corel Paintshop Pro and Photoshop Elements. Your edits will go quicker, since these software programs offer batch editing, for example making the same color adjustments for a sequence of photos. Therefore, by doing any necessary editing before uploading your images, you won't have to backtrack and make the fixes later. Note: If the online photo book service does make auto enhancements during the printing process and you already made them in your own software program, be sure to uncheck the “auto corrections” box so your images won’t be over-corrected.

Online Photobook Design Error Number Three - Photos Resolution is Too Low

This is a common problem when importing photos from sharing sites like Facebook and Flickr. While it is very handy to be able to import your photos from these sites, typically sharing sites reduce the resolution to make the files smaller for online storing. This may cause quality issues when you use these images at larger sizes in your photo book. Unfortunately these pictures may look a bit blurry once printed. For an 8x8, 8x11 or 7x9 photo book your photos will print best at a resolution of 1600x1200. Larger books such as 12x12 will require a resolution of at least 2000 x 1600 pixels.

What You Should Do Instead - Try to Use the Original Photos if Available
The majority of photobook publishers place warnings beside images that are judged too low resolution for sharp printing. If you get this warning you will unlikely be able to use one large photo on a page because you will be unhappy with the lack of sharpness. If you really want to use these photos, they will likely work ok as smaller images, i.e. they are just one of several on a page. Thus, for optimum printing use the original photo if available.

By using these suggestions you'll find that creating photo books on line will become much quicker and you'll certainly be pleased with your new creation.