We love taking photographs.
End up, we have so MANY of them that I have to compile them into book format or we will need a lot of albums and space to store them. We consider taking photographs as recording precious bits of memory that we can look back later on. I’m lucky that Hubby shared the same passion as me because everyone around us thinks we are crazy to want to take pictures of everything (sky, landscape, flora, structure, moments, food). There are times when one of us would get bored of taking photographs and the other takes over. (same thing for blogging!) ^_^
So these few months with Dar at school in the morning, I had been very productive compiling our photos into books and printing them. They were photographs from when he was just 7 months old (Feb2009) til 20months old (Mar2010). Of course, I did not print every picture we took. I had to select out of the huge pool, those that had a story or his expression was cute and interesting. So far, I have finished three books and is working on another one about our outings.
Since I printed the ’0-6months’ book and got them ready for the First Birthday Celebration (the guests viewed it and were rather impressed), I had been wanting to compile the rest of the six months including the birthday celebration as a wrap-up. However, I couldn’t find the time to and managed to only complete it just recently.
After completing two books, I started getting more familiar with layouts of digital scrapbooking and thus, for the third album, I did the pages in a scrapbook format with a square layout 8″ X 8″ with just one paper kit throughout so the album would have a cohesive look. The printed quality of the pages by the Photobook company was great and the pictures looked exactly as they are on my screen with no changes to the colour.
Simple Front Cover... Love Love...
The previous two books I did with another company were slight disappointments as there was a reddish tint throughout, the pictures were unnecessarily vivid and Dar’s fair face seemed to have rashes. They were pictures taken with my compact camera which had no issue when I printed with Photobk for the 0-6mths book. Only the DSLR pictures look a little better. As I dislike using flash when I take pictures, some features on the photographs that were printed looked blurred under the poor lighting. But they were slightly cheaper as I printed a lot of pages in one book. (58 pages in one, 150 pages in the other (abt SGD$123.41 compared to Photobk which will be around $256 if no 40% discount)
These are the 5 books I had printed:
1. Darius’ 0-6mths – 11″ x 8.5″ – 48pages - 273 photos
2. Genting Highlands with Darius – 8″ X 8″ – 40 pages - 115 photos
3. Darius’ 7-12mths – 10″ x 8″ – 58pages - 212 photos
4. Best Photography Moments of Dar(12-20mths) – 10″ x 8″ – 150pages - 153 photos
5. Darius’ 12-16months – 8″ X 8″ – 42 pages – 196 photos
Total of 949 photos printed! Great accomplishment for us who otherwise just leave them in the computer forever.
Below is a series of pictures from Darius’ 12-16months printed by Photobk. Arrived on Wednesday after I ordered it last Wednesday. The service was really fast.
Many layers of packaging before I could open it. Need to for the brown box had a dent at the corner. I like the stitch binding; looks very strong as compared to gluing.
Hubby loves the front page...
I love it too. Pictures were specially tinted to give retro black and white feel. Backpage is just two pictures I didn’t have a place to slot. Turned out nice as a wrap-up.
Book pages have a different texture compared to photo paper. So do not expect them to shine glossy and be as vibrant as individually printed 4R photos. The pixelated look is on close-up if you scrutinise but looks good still. Paper is quite thick.
This is one example why I like printing my photos into pages in a book. I can't print these individually as 4R and link them in a normal album. Now I can read and see the story unfolding in a series of pictures.
Grouping pictures together.
Designed using Photoshop Elements directly. Putting pictures into the grids of squares by using Ctrl-G, then resize accordingly. This is faster for me than trying to manipulate the sizes of the pictures in the software by Photobook. I can add Scrapbook elements too.
In case someone is interested, this was what I did for these layouts (if you have Photoshop or other editing software):
1. Create one entire page 8″x 8″ in Photoshop instead of using the software from the printing company. Make sure page is 300dpi and colour settings is sRGB.
Merge all layers of the layout into one.
2. Duplicate the background layer into another layer on top.
3. Change the top layer to “Screen“. This will make the whole doc very white.
4. Change the opacity of the Screen layer to 20%. (30% if you want it to print even brighter).
If you don't make the page brighter, then it would print much darker in the book. It printed darker even though I had 'screen' it. If not, it would be even darker.
5. Save as a jpeg in the highest res at Max 12.
6. Name the file as page01, page02… (will line up easily in Photobook software if we named them in sequence)
7. Import into the software the printing company provided for free, choose 8″ x 8″ book.
8. Put them into the pages individually. I tried to do assistant but didn’t work out.
9. Right-click, “Fit to Page” and they will blow up and fit to the dimensions of the whole page at 8″x 8″.
10. Check out the preview, ask someone to proof-read your wordings. Hubby found mistakes for me. Go back to correct your pages and do the ‘screening’ step again.
11. Insert the cover you have made or use the software to make one.
And that’s it! Start to order and upload. Hope my experience helped. 
Related posts:
- Preserving Memories… I recently came across this scrapbooking site about ‘Documenting A...
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Wavesurfer & 
Dreamycat co-write this blog, documenting Darius' developments and happy moments with him.Categories
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WOW!!!!! VERY NICE!!!! You must have spent lotsa hard work and effort to gather and layout the photos.
Sigh … I’m such a lazy mummy, always thought of doing, but never got to do it *_*
Wow the difference between the screen and print versions is significant! Would I have to give everything that overexposed look to make sure it prints decently?
A while back, I wanted to do a book with Just1Book, which is what my sis-in-law uses for her baby portraits biz. But I’m on a Mac and there were a lot of software issues.
Very nice photo books, all layouts are nice. I love the front page too.
Wow so nice, Darius is 1 lucky boy!
Thank you all for the nice comments! ^^ Just came back from the trip yesterday night and had a lot of cleaning to do. Finally, I had time to type out replies.
>>Mrs Sze: I’m lazy too (that’s why pictures from 2008 only got printed now!) so I really have to discipline myself to work on at least one or two pages everyday. A good photo editing programme like Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 really helped. The Photoshop Organiser let me see at a glance which photos I should group together and allow me to put selected ones into an album to be edited later. The layouts are more like ‘templates’. I just made one and use it throughout the whole book- just alter each squares for each page depending on my pictures.
This way, I can minimise effort on thinking of where to place the pictures and which layout I should use.
Of course, one can always use the photobook designer programme to do it but you would have to resize each picture to 300dpi and have dimensions in the size of the ‘containers’ in order to print well. Otherwise, putting a smaller picture into a bigger square would result in blurness.
>>Evelyn: I believe so as I printed four books with no ‘screening’ done to the pictures and they all printed out slightly darker than what I thought. I always do ‘leveling’ to the pictures when I edit.
So I tried this addtional ‘screening’ step to this newest book due to a tip I read and it really came out much better. At least, it was printed to my expectations. I do not like to use the function of brightening and over exposed my pictures so I believe screening of 20-30% would give a more subtle brightening layer over it.
hi can i check is the layout included in the photobook software ?
or is there any software where i can use for the layout of arranging the photo and the background design ? thanks
For my book, the layout is done by me using Photoshop Elements 7. We need to download a free software from the website for the arrangement of the photos and printing. I just import my layouts into it.
It is an easy software to use and I used it for two books previously. But because I wanted to do it faster using layer masks and made sure my pictures are all of the same lighting and resolution, I had to do it in photoshop. Also, I like to design my pages with digital scrapbooking papers and elements.
For others, they just want to showcase their photos and is happy with the variety of nice papers and layouts provided in the free designer software.
hi, if i use photobook software, how do i make sure that what i see on screen is about the same as the print? do i increase the brightness of photos using the software? thks.
Hi Pikachiu, I hadn’t used that tool before. If you do not have photo editing software, yes, probably you could use that to increase the brightness of the pictures as what is printed is usually duller or darker than what you would see on screen. I use a screening method as explained above so when I compared my print-out, the screened picture which was submited, had my skin very bright and fair but when it was printed, the print out look more like my layout BEFORE the screening, with the shadows on the areas. This is exactly what I want, to print the layout as it is before the screening. The brightening method is used to bring up the notches so they will print one step below it. If there’s no brightening method used, an already dark picture would be much darker. It’s not really that bad and they look alright but I prefer my pictures to look more vibrant.
I’ve been reading through your blog for quite awhile. And yes, while I’m at work :p
I’ve been looking for a way to adjust the photos to the colour i want for photo outputs as well. So you leave the photos and the layout of the pages between the background layer and the ‘screened’ layer of white? Or above the ‘screened’ layer?
Thanks for the showing the screening method
Thanks for reading our blog, Nat!
I do my layouts in adobe photoshop so it’s just one background picture with many layers of photos.
I then merge all the layers into one picture. After that, I duplicate the single layer and adjust the screening on the top layer.
This is not possible if you do not use photoshop or some photo editing software.
If you are using just the Photobook Designer to input photos, you will probably have to adjust the brightness of every single photo in the photobook designer itself.
I see.. Thanks for the tips!!
Am using photoshop as well 