Making a photo book

So I finally got around to making a wedding album with the awesome photos we got from our amazing photographers. After much research online on various vendors, I had it narrowed down to Blurb and MyPublisher based on reports of quality and price.

I hemmed and hawed trying to decide which one to use. I found the MyPublisher software really easy to work with, they offer lots of great photo layouts that suited my purpose and didn’t require any customization. The downer however was their lack of cover options and the extra charges that were adding up fast for every page over the 20 that are included in the base price.

Blurb has more interesting propositions for covers, particularly the image wrap option which is what I was really after. However their photo layouts all sucked and while their free software allows the creation of custom layouts, I didn’t feel it allowed me enough precision to satisfy my neurotic perfectionist tendencies. They are more generous with their pages, the base price includes up to 40 and that was definitely a plus. Eventually I was enticed to go with them thanks to a 20% off + free shipping coupon. The coupon’s looming expiry date was just the kick in the butt I needed to get my book made.

Since I had to create the page layouts from scratch I downloaded a trial version of Adobe InDesign. With the help of this Adobe InDesign Photobook Tutorial I powered through a laying out marathon one Saturday and put the whole thing together. It was time consuming but the results were well worth it. Blurb also makes it very easy to create a book that way, they have an option to upload pdfs of your cover and pages and it all worked very well. I also made sure to splurge for the premium paper since there were reports that their regular paper is a bit on the thin side.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the result. It’s pretty satisfying to be able to hold the finished product in my hands and now I want to make more books!