On the making of photo books (SoFoBoMo, PDF and Blurb)

Shore, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

It is dramatic how much the making of books has changed during the years. It used to be tedious and expensive to get a book printed, especially if you wanted to use color. Several years ago I had a couple of dozen books published, mainly guides and textbooks. Having some expert help from colleagues was invaluable, and saved a lot of money as well. But still, it was expensive.

Nowadays all you need is the net. I have used both the built-in capability of Apple iPhoto, and the Blurb service for making physical photo books. Both work well, and after getting used to the software and workflow it only takes a few minutes to get a book ready and printed.

Here is a listing of photo books which I have done in 2009-2010:

• Impressions of Midsummer's Eve (SoFoBoMo 2010; 4 MB PDF file)
  
  • Blurb version available
• Filling the square: play and dream (SoFoBoMo 2010; 6 MB PDF file)
  
  • Blurb version available
• A Walk in Copenhagen (SoFoBoMo 2009; 8 MB PDF file)
  
  • Blurb version available
• Wetness of Spring (1 MB PDF file)
  

Thanks to Markus and others for such nice feedback on the photo books. I was greatly inspired by fellow photography bloggers. Thanks to all!

All these books are related to the SoFoBoMo project. In 2008, I made a photo book directly with the Blurb software (BookSmart), but the drawback is you can only get printed books, not a PDF file. Nowadays I use the Pages software for typesetting the photo books, and Blurb for getting a printed copy.

I'm using a Mac so this may not help much, but anyway here are some instructions. Also note that I'm using Blurb in a bit of a convoluted manner. I do know that you can use specially-constructed PDF files (using InDesign) with Blurb, which may be easier for some.

First, I generate a PDF file from the Pages typesetting program using "Export..." and selecting the "Best" quality. The resulting PDF file is usually quite huge, 100-200 MB. For distributing a PDF version on the net, I compress the original PDF file using Ghostscript, giving a Unix command in Terminal:

gs -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=BK_low.pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook BK.pdf

The resulting PDF file is 10-30 times smaller than the original. As you see of my photo books, the PDF file size is typically a couple of MB only.

Next, still having the original "big" PDF file (export from Pages using "Best" quality), you can generate individual jpeg files of the pages of the document. I use Ghostscript at 300 dpi resolution, and generate separate jpeg files of the pages using the following Unix command in Terminal:

gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=jpeg -r300 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dMaxStripSize=8192 -sOutputFile=page_%d.jpg BK.pdf

You get as many jpeg files as there are pages in the document.

Next, switch over to the BookSmart software of Blurb. Use full-bleed layout the whole way, and inport the pages from the jpeg images. (Just drag and drop them.) This takes a couple of minutes, and then you are ready to proceed with upload to Blurb and ordering of a printed copy.

Here a page numbering trick comes useful. You need to "align" the page numbering in Pages and on Blurb, especially recognizing that Blurb insists of having a Blurb copyright page at the beginning and another page with the Blurb logo at the end.

I can use pages one and two (which don't have page numbers in the layout in Pages) as full-bleed images in BookSmart, and as there is the obligatory page in Blurb (which contains the Blurb logo etc.), I can start with full-bleed layout again conveniently from page three. So, the trick is to have in the beginning of the PDF file two unnumbered pages (cover and title page), and then start the page numbering from three.

This is quite easy, but unfortunately there was a bit of a learning experience on how to do this in Pages: to get no page numbers on the first two pages, and then start page numbering from three. Somehow I managed to do this but don't remember how. Now I'm just using previous documents as templates. (I do remember that it was easier to get a back cover page with no page number in the end of the Pages document.)

There are some problems in the old (iWork '08) version of Pages which I'm using, but not enough to upgrade to a newer version. For example, if you have deleted pages from the end of the book, and then cut-and-paste new pages, the deleted pages "magically" appear underneath the new pages. You need to watch out for this and delete the unwanted material.

One thing to note in Blurb is that it cuts a bit away from the edges, so you need to be ready for this in your original Pages layout. I made a quite "spacy" layout in Pages so for me this was not a problem.

When you have imported the pages into BookSmart and uploaded the document to the Blurb site, you can order a printed copy of your photo book. It only costs a couple of dozen euros, which is remarkable compared to what it cost to print a book in color in the old days.

I have ordered a copy of each of my 2010 SoFoBoMo books from Blurb, using the 25 x 20 cm softcover format. Last year this worked perfectly except that the paper was perhaps slightly too thin. This year I upgraded to "premium" paper.

Much to my surprise, I received the first of these books the next day after I got the "Order Shipment Confirmation" e-mail from Blurb. The result is good, better than last year, and that was already fine.

The premium paper was a good idea. Now all blemishes that there are are all mine. (Have to take better photographs...) What was surprising how close the end result was to what I was seeing on screen - colors are exactly what I was expecting them to be.

For those interested in on-demand publishing, Dpreview has a nice background article about Blurb. There I got an explanation for the fast delivery to Finland: there is a print location in the Netherlands.