My Inkubook Is Here
Ok please excuse the background, my desk is a mess right now with cook books everywhere so I had to take the photos on my bed instead. The book we made is 8.5″ x 11″ and we only had 20 pages so it’s pretty thin. Overall Al and I liked the book. The photos turned out much nicer in print (compared to looking at it on the monitor).
Since our book only have 20 pages the spine is very skinny. There’s a lot of empty space between the cover and the spine which feels funny when you grab the book by that aread (you can see the dent there at the bottom of the cover). Maybe added a couple pieces of cardboard to the spine would reinforce it?
We also found a page with a scratch on the photo. We’ve checked the electronic file and it’s not on there so it must have been made during printing or maybe it’s the paper itself. I’ve worked with alot of publishing houses for work so I know this is really minor but when it’s on my wedding photos it just gets to me a little bit. Hehe.
Here’s a few more shots of the inside pages. Al did the layout and he basically just put the photos on a black background.
I really like this photo on the left.
Here’s one with a cross page spread. This is also the photo we picked for enlargement. What do you think?
I really like how the colour turned out on these one with the red dress. It popped out even more with the black background.
Al and I are kind of hooked on this whole book making thing. We’re thinking of trying other publishers like Blurb and Shutterfly (suggested by Xiaobee). If you have any recommendations, please let me know.
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Comments
Hi Jan,
What a gorgeous book! Thank you for giving Inkubook a try! I will have one of our customer service representatives contact you regarding the the scratch on one of your photos.
Best,
Jim
Marketing Manager
Inkubook
jeup@inkubook.com
Hi Jan, thanks for sharing photos of your book! I started making an inkubook a few weeks ago after reading your previous posting. I also chose the 8X11 portrait book, even though landscape is usually more popular. What a coincidence that you picked that too! How did you do the cross-page spread? I want to do that too!
As you know, I already did a 12X12 book with shutterfly which turned out really well. My DH showed some people and they were drooling! Ha! I started a book with inkubook to give me a chance to do more full page bleeds, kind of like what you have!
Hi Xiaobee, I`ll answer your question with the cross spread in inkubook. The way to do cross spread on inkubook and blurb are very similar. I`ve took instruction from blurb.
1.Choose the full-bleed page layout for the left page and for the right hand page.
2. Drag your image from your library into the left-hand page, and again, drag the same image into the right-hand page.
3. Line them up so the ’seam’ or the book gutter has the image lining up correctly. This will involve using the ‘resize function’. If you need to zoom: enlarge the image to get the image to span the two pages; move your image on each page until you are happy with how it lines up in the center. You want to make sure you don’t put the important part of the image in the gutter.
I hope this helps. If you have anymore questions, feel free to ask.
Thanks Allan, I’ll give it a try. The cover looks like a matte finish, is that right?
Oh yeah Jan, I blogged about my shutterfly experience.
Allan, another question about the 2 page picture spread. I enlarged the picture (pressed the button once) but now I get a little yellow “!” on the top left corner (it says that it might not print well). My resolution is the highest already as these are pro pictures. Did you have that problem? And if so, did it print ok?
Also, I have found that silverlight hogs up a lot of computer resources and every now and then, the computer is slow. Did you find it slowing down?
I have a new computer with a good graphics card and plenty of ram so I don’t have computer resource problem. I do find that uploading the pictures take a pretty long time but that’s due to size of my file which is around 8MB each.
As for the ! mark, it might be because the resolution of your image being too low to enlarge. Even though the images you get from the studio might be taken by a pro, the digital negatives might be saved in a low resolution. You will need to see what dpi the images are. Our photos and generally print quality photos are 150 dpi or more. A good indicator that your photos have a low dpi is if the file size is small.
HI Allan, thanks for the response. My file sizes are anywhere from 6-9MB so I think the resolution should be high enough. I only pressed the “enlarge” button once, as it seemed like Inkubook needed that to get the overlap correctly.
You never had the ! problem? Did you ever have to “enlarge” the picture to do the overlap? Thanks!
Yes, I did enlarge the photos for the cross spread but it was only 2-3 clicks. I tested it and it took me a few more clicks before I got the !. I think max enlarge size would be around 15-20% before I get !.
I think I’ve figured it out now…did something in photoshop with the picture first. Thanks for your help! I’m going to try and get mine done before the end of the year! Were you guys happy with your book? Can you post more pictures?!
[...] Ok please excuse the background, my desk is a mess right now with cook books everywhere so I had to take the photos on my bed instead. The book we made is 8.5″ x 11″ and we only had 20 pages so it’s pretty thin. Overall Al and I liked the book. The photos turned [...] Source: http://www.jan-chan.com/2008/11/03/my-inkubook-is-here/ [...]