The End of Year PhotoBook thread....????

Alright, I'm going to try to make a book as well of my travels for the past 2-3 years (which is more or less when I took photography). This should be fun. But I can see that it's going to be VERY time consuming!

@Ray, any tips on minimum resolution that the photos should be in? When I process my photos in LR, I generally convert into 1024 pixel JPG photos for web usage. I take it that 1024 is not going to look too good in most situations.

Thanks for the inspiration Ray!
 
Glad you're happy with it Karen. I bought an ebook copy of yours and its pretty wonderful. I just got copies of mine too and I'm also very pleased with them, but I've had experience with them in the past so I knew I would be. I also decided that 240 pages was just too long to work as a coffee table book, so I also did another one, essentially using a subset of about 75 of the same photos, but I did the large format landscape instead of the standard size. They're only available hardback and they're pricey, but I only had one copy printed, to live in our living room. And I gotta say, that larger format REALLY lets the photos breathe in a way the smaller ones don't. They look very nice in the small one, but they really come to life in the larger format book. I think I'll do this each year but change it up somewhat. I think I'll do one long book with everything I might want to look at down the road and make one or two copies of that for myself. And then do a shorter second one in both large and small sizes. Print a few of the smaller ones as gifts and one or two large ones for my own use. And I think making the first larger one actually helped me go through more selectively to pull out what I wanted to use in the shorter one. Live and learn, but after seeing the quality of the large one, I'm definitely going to do one of those each year for as long as I maintain my enthusiasm...

-Ray
 
What a really excellent idea, Ray. I rarely get to see my stuff except on the computer. To have a book on the coffee table would be most excellent, and even though I have been aware of blurb for years, I've never done anything about it. Time to take a leaf from your book :-D and do something constructive!
 
Alright, I'm going to try to make a book as well of my travels for the past 2-3 years (which is more or less when I took photography). This should be fun. But I can see that it's going to be VERY time consuming!

@Ray, any tips on minimum resolution that the photos should be in? When I process my photos in LR, I generally convert into 1024 pixel JPG photos for web usage. I take it that 1024 is not going to look too good in most situations.

Thanks for the inspiration Ray!

I'd like to know that, also, but here's something which might help the decisionmaking.
Bookmaking Plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom | Blurb
 
Ray, any tips on the minimum number of pixels we should use for the photos? I was informed that my 1024 pixels photo did not have enough resolution for certain book formats. But couldn't find guidelines about how large (or small) the photos should be. Thanks!
 
Ray, any tips on the minimum number of pixels we should use for the photos? I was informed that my 1024 pixels photo did not have enough resolution for certain book formats. But couldn't find guidelines about how large (or small) the photos should be. Thanks!

Sorry to be late responding. I just use the largest I have. For the small book, any of my 6 or 12 mp files were fine. For my larger format book, the 6mp files ran into problems if I'd done any significant cropping. I tend not to reduce when I save my work in Aperture or with the Nik Plug ins. I make sure the final products are in jpeg so they don't take up the room of those huge TIFF files, but I always keep full resolution. And then sometimes export to a smaller format for posting on some websites. But for Blurb and other prints I go with the highest res I have. A 1024 barely cuts it on Flickr at 72 dpi - its definitely not gonna cut it for anything but the smallest format at the 300 or more dpi they use to print these books...

The good news is the software will warn you if its not big enough. But if all you have is 1024 wide files, I don't think you're gonna have much luck...

-Ray
 
Sorry to be late responding. I just use the largest I have. For the small book, any of my 6 or 12 mp files were fine. For my larger format book, the 6mp files ran into problems if I'd done any significant cropping. I tend not to reduce when I save my work in Aperture or with the Nik Plug ins. I make sure the final products are in jpeg so they don't take up the room of those huge TIFF files, but I always keep full resolution. And then sometimes export to a smaller format for posting on some websites. But for Blurb and other prints I go with the highest res I have. A 1024 barely cuts it on Flickr at 72 dpi - its definitely not gonna cut it for anything but the smallest format at the 300 or more dpi they use to print these books...

The good news is the software will warn you if its not big enough. But if all you have is 1024 wide files, I don't think you're gonna have much luck...

-Ray

Fortunately, I still have all my original RAW's or JPG's. But I need to go back and reprocess the RAW's to full size. That's going to take even more time ... yikes.

Thanks Ray!
 
I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's creations, remember to post the link to your ebook when you publish your books!

Ray, I downloaded your new ebook too!
 
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